Why the word legacy stings after something ends
A letter for the season after a chapter closes.
Why the word legacy stings after something ends
A letter for the season after a chapter closes.
Something ended. A company, a title, a marriage, a season as a philanthropist, a long chapter you were good at. And somewhere in the weeks after, the word legacy started showing up: in a toast, in an advisor’s email, in your own head at three in the morning. It landed strangely. It sounded like a word for someone whose useful part was over, and yet you were sitting right there.
If you’ve said anything about this to anyone, chances are you started with how fortunate you are. Almost everyone does. The gratitude comes first, like a toll you pay to be allowed to say the next thing. So let me pay it for you. You are fortunate, and this is still hard, and nothing has gone wrong with you.
You are not stuck. You are in between.
Between the chapter that ended and the one that hasn’t started, there is a space, and you are standing in it. It is not a delay before your life resumes. It is a real place, and people have always had to cross it. Older cultures understood this. They built a ritual for the crossing and gave each person a guide to walk them through it. The thresholds are still here. The rituals are mostly gone. So people arrive in this space with no map and no guide, and decide they must be doing it wrong. The ritual can be made again, for one person at a time, and I’ll come to that. First, what the space often does to you.
The research says what the old cultures knew. A sociologist who spent years interviewing people who had left long-held roles found that nobody steps straight from one identity into the next. There is an in-between, with stages of its own, and in it a person is known for a while by what they used to be (Ebaugh, 1988). And if it took a year or two for this to catch up with you, that is how it usually goes. The hardest stretch rarely arrives at the ending itself. It arrives later, after the congratulations have stopped and the advisors have moved on. That is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is simply when it tends to arrive.
Three things tend to happen in this in-between. Each has a reason, and knowing the reason changes how it feels.
“Who am I now?”
The role you held answered that question for you, every morning, before you were awake enough to ask it. The company answered it. The title answered it. The person you were building a life beside answered it. Now the role is gone, the answer has stopped arriving, and the question is in the room at a volume you’re not used to.
Why “what’s next?” is so hard to answer
When researchers watched people’s brains as they imagined themselves ten years ahead, the activity looked less like thinking about themselves and more like thinking about a stranger. And the more of a stranger that future self was, the less people would do for them today (Ersner-Hershfield et al., 2009).
While you were building the company, or holding the role, or raising the family, you could see yourself a year out without trying: the next quarter, the next hire, the next season of the household. When the role ended, the picture ended with it. So “what’s next?” can feel like being asked to plan a life for someone you haven’t met. That is why it’s hard to answer, and it’s also fixable. When people were helped to see their future selves clearly, they began acting on that person’s behalf (Hershfield et al., 2011). Getting specific about who you are now, and what you want now, brings the future back into focus.
Why it aches
For years, you wanted your work to matter beyond you. To the team, the customers, the family, the people who would use what you built after you were done with it. Psychologists have a name for that wish, generativity, and it is one of the most reliable sources of wellbeing in people who have built things (Erikson, 1950; McAdams & de St. Aubin, 1992).
That wish doesn’t stop when the role does. It is fully alive, and it has nowhere to go. That is the ache underneath the word legacy. Your legacy isn’t finished. The engine is running, and this particular road ended. And here is the part worth knowing: when people are reminded that a chapter is finite, this wish gets stronger, not weaker, and they give more to people they will never meet (Wade-Benzoni et al., 2012; Zaval et al., 2015). What you are feeling is not the end of your usefulness. It is your best instinct, with its outlet gone, looking for the next one.
And for anyone who has quietly wondered whether a legacy requires children: it doesn’t. The link between generativity and wellbeing is exactly as strong for people without children as for parents (Rothrauff & Cooney, 2008).
What ending well looks like
Here is what I notice about the people who cross this space and, a year or two on, are living a life they chose, can tell you why, and are loving it. Before they began anything new, they ended the last chapter well, however the ending came to them. Some chose it. Some had it chosen for them. Either way, they gave it a proper close.
This is the ritual the old cultures had, and it is what we here at LivWeal® support people with: an experience designed on purpose, with a guide, whose whole point is to close the chapter well. No two are alike, because no two chapters are the same.
For one, it was a dinner for the first ten people they had ever hired, designed so that each person heard what they had built, and so the host, for once, was told the same and let it land. For another, it was a letter to the role they had held, written over a weekend with a guide who knew which questions to ask. For a couple, it was walking their house room by room before the sale, a guide beside them, saying out loud what had happened in each room and choosing together what came with them and what stayed. For a professor, after thirty-seven years, it was an afternoon at the beach with the people who had been his community, each telling him what he had meant to them, and then playing: the kind of afternoon he had not let himself have since before his wife died.
The experiences could not be more different. What they share is the same. The people were thanked. The losses were given a proper, bittersweet farewell, including the good things being left behind, which no one expects you to miss and which you will. What was worth carrying forward was chosen, with gratitude. The rest was set down with care.
Some people skip this, because the quiet is uncomfortable and there is no one beside them to walk it. But a chapter that isn’t ended well does not stay behind. It comes with you, unfinished, and it has a way of haunting the chapter that follows.
Ending well is also what settles the three things I described earlier. The question of who you are now gets asked out loud, and answered, instead of circling at three in the morning. The future comes back into focus, because you have chosen what you are carrying into it. And the wish to matter beyond yourself, the engine that never stopped running, is handed its next road. Ending well is what lets you arrive in the next chapter with your hands and your heart free.
For most people, this is too much to do alone, and trying sends them in circles. What makes the difference is someone beside you who has no stake in what you decide, who knows which questions you have been stepping around, and who knows how to design an ending that suits you specifically. That is why we design these closings with people, and walk them through, start to finish.
So if the word legacy has been stinging, it is pointing at something. A chapter that is asking for a proper ending, and a next one that is waiting to be designed. First, finish well. The rest follows from there.
Live well,
Jennifer Love
If you’d like to talk about where you are, we would be glad to. The first conversation is twenty minutes and private, and whatever comes next is yours to choose.
Request a conversation.
If you’d like to see what ending well looked like for one person, read Bruce Kendall’s story: he closed a thirty-seven-year career, lost his wife, and chose to carry her research forward.
References
Ebaugh, H. R. F. (1988). Becoming an ex: The process of role exit. University of Chicago Press.
Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and society. Norton.
Ersner-Hershfield, H., Wimmer, G. E., & Knutson, B. (2009). Saving for the future self: Neural measures of future self-continuity predict temporal discounting. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 4(1), 85–92. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsn042
Hershfield, H. E., Goldstein, D. G., Sharpe, W. F., Fox, J., Yeykelis, L., Carstensen, L. L., & Bailenson, J. N. (2011). Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(SPL), S23–S37. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.48.SPL.S23
McAdams, D. P., & de St. Aubin, E. (1992). A theory of generativity and its assessment through self-report, behavioral acts, and narrative themes in autobiography. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62(6), 1003–1015. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.62.6.1003
Rothrauff, T., & Cooney, T. M. (2008). The role of generativity in psychological well-being: Does it differ for childless adults and parents? Journal of Adult Development, 15(3–4), 148–159. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-008-9046-7
Wade-Benzoni, K. A., Tost, L. P., Hernandez, M., & Larrick, R. P. (2012). It's only a matter of time: Death, legacies, and intergenerational decisions. Psychological Science, 23(7), 704–709. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612443967
Zaval, L., Markowitz, E. M., & Weber, E. U. (2015). How will I be remembered? Conserving the environment for the sake of one's legacy. Psychological Science, 26(2), 231–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614561266
