As a child, I wanted to do something great so that my name would live on in the annals of history. Perhaps I was besieged by existential angst more than the average child, or perhaps I grieved the loss of my ancestors’ stories, their names and faces and personalities forever hidden to me, but it chilled me to think that I would return to dust one day, all traces of my being erased.
My aspiration of choice for leaving a legacy was to become a writer. Inflated though my ego may have been, I recognized that I did not have the genius to become the next Albert Einstein, the talent to become the next Beethoven, nor the ambition and procreating impulses to become the next Genghis Khan. But putting pen to paper in the vein of Dickens, Shakespeare, or Brontë? Surely that was doable. (I mentioned my ego, right?)
Yet life didn’t take me down the writer’s road, at least not initially. As the daughter of immigrants, I was made to understand the importance of a stable career, and since I had some aptitude in the sciences, I ended up becoming a physician. I couldn’t be more grateful for that, yet I never lost the urge to write. As I recently started diving into the writing world in my spare time as a book reviewer and soon-to-be author, my eyes were opened to the glut of books published each year, many of which languish in obscurity, sold off as “remainders” that no one wants, or worse, discarded. It turns out that writing a book is no guarantee of immortality.
My selfish ambition will never create the kind of lasting, regenerating impact—hidden though it may be from human eyes—that selfless love does.
Ironically, it was through a book that I finally recognized that the legacy of a life well-lived does not always mean being remembered by history. Oscar Hokeah’s Calling for a Blanket Dance is a multigenerational tale of a Cherokee-Kiowa-Mexican family that faces a host of challenges, including financial stress, health problems, repeated moves, and general precarity. The matriarch, Lena Stopp, has passed down her deep care to impact successive generations. One manifestation of her love is the hand-sewn quilts that she designs and crafts for each family member, which offer comfort and succor to her great-grandchildren at a crucial moment of vulnerability. Lena’s niece-in-law, Opbee Geimausaddle, remarks, “The love she had for her family was laced within every piece of thread stitched across her quilts. It was Lena who held us all together.”
The quilts, of course, are a physical expression of the invisible outpouring of Lena’s fierce, protective devotion to her family. Lena’s spirit of love, transmitted to her descendants, rescues them from the brink of ruin.
We often hear about generational trauma, or how the grief and pain of our ancestors can be passed down to us in the methylation patterns of our DNA or in the dysfunctional relational dynamics that become a family’s default, but the stories within Calling for a Blanket Dance show that we can also inherit generational love. How beautiful that in giving of ourselves out of love for others, we impart to them small fragments of ourselves that get passed down; those love-sown remnants live on.
It may be a roundabout way to achieve immortality, but it’s an illustration of what Jesus tells us in John 12:24: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit” (NRSVUE). My selfish ambition will never create the kind of lasting, regenerating impact—hidden though it may be from human eyes—that selfless love does.
I still write—I can’t help it—but now I do so knowing that my words will fade, however permanent the ink initially appears. Paradoxically, it’s in the intangible interactions with my family, friends, and neighbors that my impact will have its most lasting effects. Love lives on, spreading and proliferating, as the source of Love reigns eternal. Abiding in Love, we create enduring legacies, uncelebrated and unacknowledged here on earth, though they may be.
This article was first published in the Covenant Companion Winter 2025 issue, the official magazine of the Evangelical Covenant Church.
