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Have You Thought About Your Legacy?

Chris Lowry

Sep 12, 2023

I’m sure it will make it’s way into A Double Shot of Revenge soon.

A few weeks ago, a person who was in charge of an agency in my hometown got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

To the tune of $700k in chocolate chips.

If choco chips were dollar bills.

Further digging showed he stole almost a million choco chips from his clients when he was a lawyer.

We call it Murdaugh-ing it, but a lot of lawyers do it.

Have done it.

And then, he got into a fight with his grown son, they wrestled over a pistol and they both were shot.

He’s gone now, to his reward, as some like to say.

Thought what that reward might be isn’t up for me to judge.

After all, he was also a deacon at his church, a frequent philanthropist and a high profile promotor of a dying town.

Which makes me wonder about the good he did versus the bad.

The bad wasn’t wanting the money.

Just in how he made it.

Though, sometimes, I can understand why.

It is, after all, only an imaginary concept that exists mostly as 1’s and 0’s in a computer ledger.

And working with tax dollars and Federal Grants and seeing some of the 1% in the state with their made up stock market money, well, it gets easy to imagine why you would do.

Might do.

Could do.

All that should get explored in a Jake Burbank book, probably over whiskey neat, probably with his best friend highlighting why one person who could take all that money could get away with it, while another gets shot in his front yard by the country club.

Probably and possibly marked under things that don’t make sense.

And won’t.

He’s dead and buried now, which calls off the investigation, though some on the City Council are calling for a detailed forensic audit.

I think that will probably die too.

Mark the file, “don’t speak ill of the dead.”

Is it money that makes people do crazy things, or are people just crazy and money happens to be one of the ways it brings the eccentricities to light?

Having been both poor, and broke and the opposite of both, I would argue that money doesn’t do much more than highlight.

There are people who give and give, and if it ain’t money, it’s time or veggies from their garden or cakes from their oven.

They give of themselves, by cleaning and caring and basically doing as they are able.

And if they have money, the might give that too.

You know some of these folks.

You might be some of these folks.

The kind of soul doing their Saturday shopping who puts an extra couple of canned goods in the cart to pass along on a food drive.

Or maybe a person who buys school supplies when they go on sale just to send to the overworked teacher at school.

Maybe in more private ways, like tipping extra to a hard working waitress, or offering up art that people seem to enjoy.

Generosity, in all it’s multi-faceted methods.

I’m not sure what lessons the legacy of the tarnished community leader will leave.

I suspect most of it will be swept under the rug, because of his ties with other agencies and talking about his work might shine a light on other activities.

There are a lot of non-powerful voices asking where a lot of money is going and what it’s doing in a town slowly going under.

I would bet his wife sets up a scholarship in his name, and his children install a memorial plaque in a park, but other than that, his lessons, if any are to be learned, will be lost.

Maybe his lasting impression will end up on the pages of a book you’ll buy one day soon.

If I’m feeling generous.

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