We are all travelin’ in the footsteps
Of those who come before
And we’ll all be re-united
On that new and sunlit shore
When the Saints Go Marchin’ In

I rarely, if ever, stop to think about those who came before me, those who bore my name, provided me the opportunity to lead my privileged little life. Too often, I have the gall to belief that my life has been its own little vacuum, created by me, context-free, self-contained.

I remember my wife, then my girlfriend, first entering my family fold for some holiday or other. She met my great aunt Ida, and spoke with her for some time. She told me how cool my aunt was, how remarkable a life she had. Ida, it turns out, was really intelligent, insightful and worldly. The wife of an ambassador, she had traveled and studied extensively. She knew things.

I was aghast.

Before this evening, aunt Ida was, to be honest, nothing more to me than ancient furniture or dusty decoration, appropriate only for the holidays. And we brought her to the house for her amusement, to keep her occupied, to stave off depression or dementia or something. She was one-dimensional, an old person and nothing else.

It never occurred to me that she was an actual person with a story, a back-story, a life! Yet the arc of her lifespan included the Great Depression, two World Wars, and truly mind-blowing technological change, from the advent of auto and air travel, up through surfing the net. So she had thoughts, thoughts about the politics of the day, opinions about world affairs, ideas on pop culture. Good thoughts. Important opinions.

What a lesson I learned that day. It makes me wonder: how much knowledge and greatness have we collectively let lapse through such close-mindedness?

My mother pays great attention to detail generally speaking, but never more so than in the process of writing her will. I found myself frustrated with her dotting and re-dotting “i’s” and crossing “t’s”.

“C’mon, Mom. Let’s decide who gets your watch so I can go home!”

But she would have none of it. She frequently mentioned how seriously she took her charge, as she felt her net worth, her wealth, if you will, was never really hers. It was the legacy of her father George, the ever-laboring, palm-calloused German butcher, or her mother Anne, the brilliant, well-read librarian. It belonged to my father’s parents, successful entrepreneurs before their time. And it belonged to generations of hard-working immigrants, going back to Poland, Germany, Scotland and Ireland.

So we met with the financial advisors, the lawyers. We treated this family legacy with the care it deserved.

We’ve all heard the caution that those who know nothing of history are bound to repeat it. But that’s not the only risk we take:

We risk losing the richness, the greatness of history.

Bottom line: I believe we can neither love, honor, trust, respect, or even understand ourselves without doing the same for those who have paved the path for us.

So I think we should plan to spend some time this year with someone in our family who has a few years on us. Yes, they will most certainly benefit from the pleasure of our company. But we can decide, in advance that our encounters will not be one-way streets, that we will benefit from the knowledge, wit and joy that can only be borne of a lifetime of accumulated wisdom.

Let’s make ourselves available, so we lose no more.

Let the greatness of the past live on!