Does a Dragonfly Count as Legacy?

September 15, 2021 Stephanie Joy Phillips

One morning this summer, I had the latest episode of The Full Stop Podcast playing in my ears as I was leaving the house. Specifically, Stephanie Joy Philips was talking about the ‘Leaving a Legacy’ day during World Childless Week.

Stepping out, I almost walked into an enormous spider web spanning my tiny front deck. Having eaten her fill, Spider had vanished for the day, but this Dragonfly was caught in the web. At first I thought it was dead, but when I reached my hand under the web and tapped its legs, those legs wrapped themselves around my finger and held on. I was able to pull it free… and then watched it fly right back into the web. We repeated this nonsense a couple more times until Dragonfly and I were able to get to the azalea bushes in front of the building.

With Steph’s words about there being many ways to leave a legacy echoing in my mind, I stopped an extra moment to really see Dragonfly in all its green glory and snapped its portrait. And I thought, this is legacy too.

The ways of Spirit and the Universe are unknowable, and I choose to hold space for the possibility that somehow every dragonfly saved is noted in the tally under my name. Every earthworm, every spider, every cicada. Their life is better because I existed.

We each of us ripple out in a hundred million ways.

How do I want, how do I choose, to ripple out?

I have not rippled out goodness in the shape of a child.

Wretched heartbreak, disappointment, and grief.

This branch of the tree will end with me.

Heavy guilt, disappointment, and grief.

And yet…

And also,

As I live into this childless identity and look at ideas of legacy this way and that, it occurs to me: Isn’t thinking that children are the only way to leave a legacy a little lazy? A tad bit boring?

Three years ago, the news of a friend’s unexpected but very wanted pregnancy demolished my estimation of my life’s accomplishments in the space of a breath. Nothing I ever accomplished would be worth as much as that baby announcement.

Today…. maybe hopefully I wouldn’t be so demolished.

If today we were taking stock of my legacy, glimmers emerge, images leap to mind:

The three children that I took care of thirty years ago; I am part of their happy childhood memories.

The barely fourteen year old guitar player/singer that I invited to play during the farmers market this year because he’s that good; he will always remember the summer when he started performing in public.

The gardens, large and small, that I have planted wherever I’ve lived.

Those fifteen upcycled cashmere hats that I made and gave away last winter; keeping heads warm all over the planet.

The three women who were my assistant managers over my years at the shop; I made it a safe landing space while they figured out early adulthood.

The poems I have scribbled, artsy things I have crafted, and recipes I have shared.

Legacy doesn’t have to be a child or a marble monument or an endowment.

Legacy is what George Bailey realizes when Clarence the Angel shows him a life without George Bailey.

The fact that I am here on this Earth will have mattered.

True, I will not have grown an adorable replica-ish human now breathing oxygen, but…