Why Care About One’s Legacy, When One Will Be Dead?

This piece appeared in the newspapers in late October, 2025.

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What’s a human life about, anyway? That’s a question that Rudy Giuliani raised for me — unintentionally, I’m sure — when he was asked about his LEGACY. Wasn’t he afraid, the reporter asked him, that his doing so much dirty work for Donald Trump would mar his legacy?

Giuliani replied that he didn’t care about his legacy: “I’ll be dead.” So what difference would it make to him if the people of the future no longer thought of him as a hero of 9/11 but instead of someone who’d sold his soul to the devil?

At one level, I found Giuliani disgusting — because I really do care about my legacy, and something seemed all wrong about Giuliani’s indifference to what it is he leaves behind him, and how people will regard him in the generations to come.

Yet Giuliani did have a point. If one doesn’t believe in an afterlife in which one would know anything about how one is regarded, what difference does a good legacy make?

Which is to say: if there’s no afterlife to enjoy the applause, why should legacy matter?

But what makes Giuliani disgusting is that he leaves out something essential — something he evidently can’t feel.

It seems there are two ways it makes sense to care about what one leaves behind.

First, there is the love that binds generations. We picture those we cherish — children, grandchildren — remembering us kindly, feeling the warmth we tried to give. That imagined future affection feeds something in us now, assuring us that our love endures beyond our presence.

Second, there is appreciation and recognition — the hope that our efforts to add something good to the world will be seen and valued. When Lou Gehrig, dying, told the crowd he was “the luckiest guy in the world,” it was that love and gratitude from others that sustained him.

(I know the feeling: if I could sense, here and now, that what I’ve labored to show would one day help humankind reconceive its future, that recognition would meet the deepest unmet need of an otherwise fortunate life.)

Both these kinds of caring — the love that endures and the appreciation that remembers — touch something deep within us, yet they also express our bond with others.

It both is and is not about ego. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel that one’s life has mattered; we all need that. But we can also go beyond Giuliani’s purely selfish calculus — “If there’s nothing in it for me, I don’t care.” It’s a question of love. If one truly loves others — and the world itself — one naturally cares how things go for them. We want to serve those who come after us, just as we honor those whose love and goodness still reach us from the past.

(As my father’s “descendant,” a recipient of his “legacy,” I still feel his love working in my life, and I honor him in memory.)

When it comes to the larger kind of legacy — things like public recognition — that’s also about love: love of a world I want to see more whole, less destructive, more in touch with its deepest values. And ego too: I’m also in it to feed something in me that hungers for recognition. I care about both those kinds of things, and therefore I care about my legacy. I want the love to continue in the relationship even when I’m gone, and for my life’s work to be remembered as helping to make the world more whole.

For we all leave behind an image of how a human life can be lived. Rudy Giuliani leaves behind the image of a man who descended from heroic prosecutor to cruel liar — one willing to ruin the lives of a few innocent Black women to help a human monster like Donald Trump claw his way to power despite clearly losing an election.

That, too, is a legacy — the legacy of a man who didn’t love the world enough to care what impact he had on it, or love its people enough to give a damn what anyone thought about him.

But love working through time is a vital artery in the human world — enriching it, making it a better place. With their love of beauty, how great were the gifts that Shakespeare and Bach left as their legacy!

Or, more to the point, in stark contrast to Giuliani’s life-trajectory of descent into evil, how great was the gift Nelson Mandela gave to his troubled corner of the human world.

Mandela was jailed by the apartheid regime for more than thirty years — because he was part of a movement to overturn the status quo, one that had used violence in its struggle. Yet when he emerged after those decades of imprisonment by a racist ruler, he had somehow left the war behind. He came out a remarkable man who helped shift power from a white minority to a black majority without a bloody conflict. (I worked in American national security in the 1980s, and I can attest that the Africa experts of that time did not think such a peaceful transition was possible.)

That is a legacy for the good: to have helped that piece of the human world unwind its injustices without widespread slaughter — that’s no small gift.