Living it Forward

...carrying on and sharing the deeper gifts

Midsummer Sunrise. Photo courtesy Mary Scholz

More than 20 years ago when I considered what I wanted to share at my mother’s funeral, I was hit with a surprising revelation: Maybe the best way to honor the dead is to identify the best of their values — the ones that really resonate with, fulfill, challenge, and enliven us — and carry them forward. So when a couple days later it came my turn to speak, I said, basically: Sure, we have our memories and our stories about this person, and those memories and stories are important. Problem is, we can hold them and share them and I guess we can even write them down, but eventually, those memories will fade and die along with us. The past is lost. But the values? That’s different. That’s a story in the making. That’s taking what we gained from our relationship with a person and living it forward.

And this doesn’t apply only to the dead. We can carry the values of anyone forward by making them our own and building them into the architecture of our lives. And we can pass them on in turn.

At the funeral, I gave an example that I knew everyone who knew my mother would be able to relate to: her love of beauty. And the story I shared that most of those present also knew quite well was how my mother moved away from a recently constructed home in the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, with easy street access, city water and other services and a gas furnace, a pitched roof and everything the city has to offer. Where did she take us? To a home about a 40-minute drive away, located five miles west of Chelsea, a 1942 construction building that had grown in awkward stages from a cottage, perched atop a hill at the end of a steep blacktop driveway that was impossible to maintain in the winter, meaning we had to carry our groceries and everything else up and our trash and everything else down a long flight of iron stairs all winter long.

The new house had a flat roof prone to leaking no matter what was done. Instead of natural gas heat and city water it had a cranky though reliable old fuel oil furnace and a well pump that seemed bound to fail sooner or later and, sure enough, it did. Chelsea was a nice little town even then, but for many things we had to drive all the way back to Ann Arbor, and, owing to my mom’s discomfort with the speeds and truck traffic on I-94, she’d take either Jackson or Scio Church Road, further adding to the travel time on those errands.

Point is, none of this was convenient. But here’s the thing: That hill that made life difficult also meant that the house overlooked a half mile of open water across Cavanaugh Lake, facing west through a canopy of mature oaks and hickories. Four huge doorwall-style windows opened toward that vista. The interior was pretty rustic in other ways: knotty pine walls and ceiling tiles overhead, old linoleum floor tiles underfoot until my mom had carpets installed. But people would gasp at the view before them through those windows when they stepped inside our home for the first time. Mouths would drop. There was no way to prepare for it.

And it just was that way. It’s what I grew up with. In the morning the sun shone on the shoreline on the far side of the lake, and in the evening we’d watched it go down, setting the water on fire. Spring, summer, fall, winter — there was no ugly season, no ugly weather, just an ongoing scene of dramatic visual intensity and a thousand subtle moods reflected in the water and the sky and the trees that answered to and celebrated these great forces.

In other words, my mother was willing to sacrifice the conveniences and conventional stylings of our typical 4-bedroom Ann Arbor colonial for something higher: real beauty. And as I delivered this message and shared my intention to carry that value forward with all those gathered in her memory — with many of those present knowing exactly what I was talking about, having visited us there — something tapped my right shoulder from behind and I heard the words: “And if you get a chance, you’re gonna do exactly the same thing.”

That was in March, 2004. Strange to say, after a series of remarkable synchronicities and coincidences, three months later Mary and I closed on the purchase of a lakeside home in north Oakland County, Michigan. We hadn’t even been looking for a new home. Stranger still, it wasn’t until a few weeks later when my sister and I were standing together in the driveway that I realized something peculiar about this place I was just about to move to. My childhood home was a yellow, vinyl-sided house at the end of blacktop driveway on a hill overlooking a lake, surrounded by mature oaks, with a walkout basement and a two-car garage with an attached office and a fake well in the yard plus a pear tree on the lot line shared with a neighbor named Tom.

Point for point, those descriptors matched the home we had just purchased. Put those parameters into Zillow. You won’t find much on the market.

True, where I live now we face east and my childhood home faced west, so we see the sun rising over the lake instead of the sunsets. And where we now live there’s no arduous climb from the garage to the house. But still. Astonishing parallels. I mean, I grew up hauling mowers up retaining walls to mow little terraced lawns. We have retaining walls here, too . I still have to deal with that. And the parallels go deeper, even, but that’s enough for now. You get the point.

I share this story for several reasons. The first is that values matter. Statements of value-driven intent matter. Decisions driven by values matter, perhaps even especially when those decisions are made at an emotionally charged inflection point, like a funeral. Likewise, gatherings, including funerals, where people express their deeper feelings and what’s important to them, these matter, too. Finally, I don’t know what or who tapped me on the shoulder and spoke silently but clearly to me as I delivered my short speech at the funeral service, but I’m certain that somehow, that factored into events that followed as well.

In part, this is a follow-up to my last Substack post on beauty. You see, I’m still carrying that forward, even now. And it’s not to say it all started when my mother died in 2004. I’m my mother’s son in this regard especially, and I’d long cared about beauty, bucking the gender role stereotypes. I worked with art and art groups and I’d made a study of aesthetic education during grad school that landed me a little fellowship. And yes, sometimes a person makes the commitments, but maybe on a deeper level the commitments make the person. Sometimes maybe it’s more a question of seeing where our commitments really are.

Living our values is not always easy, but there are a lot of worthy ones to choose from: honesty, courage, compassion, beauty, faith… the list goes on. The world turns on such things, especially as we move toward fuller and fuller embodiment of them and learn what they really ask of us.

Personally I think it’s a great time to pick one. Like right now, for 2025 my theme is courage. Might seem odd to pick just one, since there’s a whole smorgasbord of powerful values to choose from. But what I’ve seen is that such values tend to work together and reinforce one another anyhow. I mean, doesn’t honesty require courage? Doesn’t compassion when it shows up become a thing of beauty? So one way to approach these momentous times might be to pick a powerful value to carry forward and see how it goes. Or, maybe you’ll know which one because it seems to be picking you, the way the demanding path of beauty picked me. When I spoke of my mother as an example of a person who put the value of beauty near the center of her life, something changed in me. Something clarified.

I can tell you I had a very limited sense of the life-changing consequences of my words as I spoke that day. I did not foresee the path ahead. But the larger thing is, as we live and as we grow, we can and do inherit and carry forward the values of our parents, friends, relatives, teachers and others. They’re all models. Living or dead, doesn’t matter. The real question is, which values are worthy ones? Which do we want to carry forward?

About this, at least, we can make our choices and intentions clearer. And as part of this process of more conscious choosing, I suggest we honor those who served as carriers of the values we admire, those who brought them into our lives by example. Values and qualities like kindness, perseverance, gratitude, and so on are all attributes of the divine, or if you prefer, perhaps our higher selves, or our best selves — call it what you will. If our models are still living, maybe we can even tell those who helped shape our values what we’ve learned from them and saw worthy to carry on. If they are no longer living, we can still be thankful for them and their gifts.

And either way, my experience is that there’s phenomenal power in these deeper values when they live through us, and us through them. They absolutely reach beyond us in ways we can only begin to fathom, and they have the capacity to remake our worlds and our experience of life in their image.

Skating, circa 2006. Photographer unknown.