Leaving nothing behind

The liberation of no legacy

Jody and her 1980s shero, Madonna. (Seville, February 2024).

I am childless-not-by-choice, although now in my early sixties and having integrated the loss of thwarted motherhood into my soul and skin, I sense that I might be as at ease with it as if I had chosen it, although I’ll never know for sure. But I’ll take the peace, ‘dropping slow’, as Yeats and I both longed for in The Lake Isle of Innisfree,¹ looking out as I write on the shades of grey and green melting over the tungsten water of the Irish Atlantic.

But it wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the idea of my non-existent biological legacy bothered me deeply, so intertwined was it with my childless grief, that it could hollow me out like an apple corer.

I remember one particularly raw moment in my late forties, sitting alone in an English country churchyard, weeping as I contemplated my own future grave, bare of chiselled and cherished relationships. No ‘beloved wife and mother’ for me, and thus no loving descendants to tend it; just an overgrown mossy mess, tilting with insignificance.

The grief caught me by surprise. After all, I’d spend almost a decade recovering from the clusterfuck that was my midlife divorce and childlessness, and I no longer felt that each day was one spent treading water till I died. But it seemed that after only a short time unplugged from my carefully curated single life, and embedded into a residential training as part of my psychotherapy studies, my difference from every other student there was backing up inside me like toxic sludge. Each lunchtime and evening, the air was filled with chat about children and the partners at home caring for them, and even a walk in the fragrant abbey gardens offered no escape, as snatches of private mobile phone conversations ambushed me in the towering rhododendron arcades. I felt like an unloved and unlovable freak.

I had mistakenly thought that this time away with my colleagues was going to be a great opportunity to get to know them better, but motherhood took up all the oxygen in the room, and I was left gasping for air. However, the negative space left by my longed-for children, the ones who were with me in my soul, but not in my life—that was neither witnessed nor held. And when I did share my struggle with one of my colleagues, her response was to say that if she hadn’t had children, she didn’t think she would have missed it—and this from someone who never stopped talking about them, or the joys, trials and identity of motherhood! Ah, I hope some childless client isn’t now sitting across from her, picking her jaw off the floor at her latest empathy failure…

And so I escaped to the churchyard next to the abbey where the training was taking place, and walked smack into the generational legacy I’d never have, and a reminder that my losses would last for eternity. And I wept.

The following year, I self-published the first edition of my book Living the Life Unexpected,² which has since been published in two more editions by Bluebird (PanMacmillan UK), and has accompanied many involuntarily childless women (and quite a few men too) as they find their feet in life again. Chapter 12, which is about ageing without children, includes my thoughts on legacy, but rereading that first version from 2013, I can see how much my thoughts have evolved.

Back then, I was still suggesting alternative ways to pass on our hard-earned knowledge and wisdom other than through our children. These days, I know that everything I’ll ever know, everything I’ll ever be in this lifetime, will eventually be forgotten. And that there’s a sweet peace in embracing that.

Yes, I do accept that I’ll live on for a while in the memory of the people (both known to me and not), who’ve been touched by my work, kindness and generosity, but they too will die in their turn. And my book (which many like to say is my ‘baby’, but I never do) will indeed survive me, but it’ll be old-fashioned and out-of-print one day too. The section on how important Madonna was a feminist role model for me in her 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan already reads like ancient history, especially the quaint notion that I had to go to the cinema repeatedly to keep watching it, as back then nobody I knew had a video player; it’d be another few years before Blockbuster video shops took over the British high-street, a name which has already faded into retail history.

Sitting with the feeling that you are the blank spot on your family tree, whilst relatives younger than you spider down the paper, can be a weighty one. And then if you add old age, with its known-unknowns, but without any children to (hopefully) navigate them, an existential howl feels quite reasonable. That was me in that churchyard, aching for all the missed connections in my life—past, present and future.

Although a little of this weight stayed with me, I was able to put it to rest more fully when I took part in a Work That Reconnects workshop in 2019, encouraged by a dear childless friend. I was teetering on the edge of burnout, but pushing on anyway (as burnouters do), feeling soul-weary, yet unable to rest even when I tried, because it seemed my brain no longer had an ‘off’ button. I was determined to keep doing my work supporting women transitioning into permanent involuntary childlessness, whilst at the same time yearning to step into the crone archetype, the She who was calling to me to shed my mid-life skin and be done with so much of what I thought was my identity.³

At that workshop, we took part in a ‘deep time’ exercise created by the root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, Joanna Macy. In it, the group walked backwards in a circle with our eyes partially closed, whilst the facilitator directed us back through time, into our mother’s belly, into our grandparents’ lives, into the life of our known, then unknown ancestors, right back to the beginning of the human story on earth.⁴ As we did so, I felt my chest getting tighter and my shoulders heavier with the weight of all who had gone before me, all that they had loved, lost and endured to make my life possible, and the guilt and sadness I felt at letting them down by not having children.

However, once the exercise shifted into moving forward through time, passing back through all the generations and arriving again at the present day, I was astonished to discover that my ancestors disagreed with my assessment. It turns out they were not disappointed in me at all. In fact, they let me know that they had chosen me to be the face of the lineage at this crucial moment in human history, that they had prepared me for it, and were proud of me: we’ve got your back, they said.

Even though I don’t know my Irish father or my father’s people, not even a photograph, and only have the sketchiest idea of my maternal grandparents’ ancestors—they know me. As someone who has experienced considerable neglect in my life, to sense the heft of ancestral support flowing towards me was a revelation. And it has been crucial in supporting me through the last five years as I’ve let go of middle age and embraced my young elderhood.

To honour their support, and learn how to lean into it more fully, I’ve studied Daniel Foor’s Ancestral Medicine⁵ model, and daily now I work on building a more conscious relationship with my lineages, so that I can be of service to them, as well as to the land and more-than-human forces that feel so present here in rural Ireland. In many ways, these practices are bringing me back into a relationship with the unseen world that was natural and effortless for me as a small child, before a Church of England primary school and Sunday School redirected my instinctive spiritual inclinations. Perhaps all children are born natural animists?⁶ Certainly, the idea that a tree, rock or river was an inanimate object would have been alien to me as a child, nurtured and comforted as I was by the embrace of woods, earth and waters. It’s good to be talking and listening⁷ to trees again.

And so it seems I’ve come full circle since that time in the churchyard, so much so that I no longer even want to have a grave. I had planned to be buried without a headstone in an English bluebell wood, but in my most recent will, I changed that to being cremated so that my ashes can be scattered or buried here on the land where I now live in rural Ireland, along with the people and animals I love—and my ancestors, of course. My DNA suggests that County Cork is the root of my Irish ancestry, but even without that, I feel them across deep time, right back to the Central Anatolian and Sardinian grandmothers who arrived here thousands of years ago, long before the Celts, and who left their culture’s mark on the landscape with the glory of Newgrange, and any number of more modest stone monuments. I need no tombstone now because, even if I had had children, my name and memory would have been forgotten in a couple of generations. But once I’ve joined the ancestors, my energy will live on in the wind, water and soil, and will be there to support whoever comes after me, and calls for my help.

I’m preparing to be forgotten as an individual and remembered as part of a lineage of love and care for the earth and all her children.

I’ve noticed this shift, this lightening of the burden of what legacy means to those of us without children, amongst other elder childless women too. As we mourn the children (and grandchildren) we’d longed for, we are released from the idea of ‘continuing’ through them. And thus the focus can return to our own lives, and the smaller daily acts of kindness and presence that can make up a life.

Embracing my mortality has freed me from the idea of legacy. Embracing my insignificance has freed me from striving to replace the 'significance' I had assigned to the role of motherhood in other areas of endeavour. Without this weight, I am free to live as best I can, and leave any concept of legacy to those who might remember me for that blink of time after my death.

And in that, there is liberation.

---

Thank you for being one of my readers; I appreciate you very much! If you’d like to support my work, you can do so by:

• ‘Hearting’ this post so that others are encouraged to read it (and the Substack algorithm shares it more widely);

• Leaving a comment (I do my best to respond to each of them);

• Sharing this post by email or on social media (including Substack’s own ‘Notes’ platform);

• Taking out a paid subscription to this Substack in your local currency;

• Leaving me a one-off tip by buying me a coffee.

---

For more on issues of ‘legacy’ for women without children, you might enjoy watching this discussion (below) that I hosted in September 2021 for World Childless Week.

Additionally, you might want to register for the next free ‘Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elderwomen’ webinar we’re doing on Saturday, 28th June 2025 at 7pm BST (live & recorded) on ‘Life After Menopause.’ Click here to register.

---

1. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. (London: Kagan Paul, Trench and Co., 1889.) Public domain. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree

2. The first edition, 2013, was titled Rocking the Life Unexpected. Both the 1st Bluebird (Pan Macmillan) editions, 2016 & 2020, are titled Living the Life Unexpected. Download the intro and first chapter free at: https://gateway-women.com/book

3. I wrote about the time of being called by the Crone archetype here in 2019: https://jodyday.substack.com/p/the-liminal-years

4. 'Harvesting the Gifts of the Ancestors’ is a deep time exercise of the Work That Reconnects: https://workthatreconnects.org/resources/harvesting-the-gifts-of-the-ancestors-original/

5. Daniel Foor (2017). Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing. https://ancestralmedicine.org/bio/

6. Robert Macfarlane, in his magnificent new book Is A River Alive? reports a conversation he had with his young son as he walked him to school. His son asked him what the title was for the book he was working on, and when he answered, his son said, ‘Well, duh, that’s going to be a short book then Dad, because the answer is yes!’ https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/32424/robert-macfarlane

7. I’m reading Olivia Sprinkel’s gorgeous memoir To Hear the Trees Speak at the moment, and loving it. She’s here on Substack too.