If legacy is the residue of a life, then storytelling is the vessel that carries it forward. I have come to believe that stories are the most enduring inheritance one can leave. They do not require vaults, lawyers, or tax documents. They require only memory and a listener with enough patience to sit still.
As a child, I was nourished on stories. My parents told them, my grandparents embroidered them, and my eccentric aunt improved them with scandalous details. Around the table, on long drives, or beside a winter fire, stories shaped me more than lectures ever could. They carried not only information but cadence, humour, and a peculiar intimacy.
Now, when I find myself in the company of younger relatives, I try my hand at this noble art. The results are mixed. Children, it seems, have a brutal honesty about narrative pacing. Yet when I catch their eyes widening at some remembered adventure of my youth or when they giggle at an embarrassing misstep,I realise that something of me is being woven into their imagination.
It is tempting to dismiss such storytelling as trivial, but I think it is nothing less than the architecture of identity. Stories give coherence to the past, meaning to the present, and possibility to the future. They are how we locate ourselves in the vast sprawl of history. To tell stories, then, is to hand the next generation a compass.
And stories, unlike material inheritances, can grow with each telling. They shift, acquire embellishments, adapt themselves to the needs of new listeners. A tale of my clumsy teenage years may one day become a lesson in resilience for a niece, or a comic relief for a nephew facing his own adolescent trials. In this way, the story outlives the storyteller, carrying forward not merely entertainment but orientation.
Of course, not all stories are benign. Some carry bitterness, resentment, or fear. To live well is to curate the stories we pass along, choosing which to tell, which to reshape, and which, perhaps, to release into silence. This is itself a moral labour: to transmit what heals, not what corrodes.
So, I shall continue to tell stories of mistakes and triumphs, of friendships and failures, of absurdities that prove life is rarely neat. And if, one day, my nieces and nephews find themselves telling their own children about “that odd uncle who once set his brother afire” (true story, though the wind bore equal blame), then I shall count my life a success.
