Questions over who should inherit personal belongings can provoke “existential angst” among people without children, freelance journalist Kiran Sidhu has written in a Guardian opinion column.
Sidhu said the issue arose after a friend discussed his will with her and spoke of the importance of looking after his daughter financially. She told him her own money would go to Macmillan Cancer Support and animal charities.
Her friend then asked who would receive her deceased mother’s ring. Sidhu wrote that the question made her consider where “the precious artefacts from our lives” go after death.
She described treasuring a quirky vase that sits in her study window and an owl candlestick given to her as a birthday present by a potter friend, and said such objects carry parts of her.
According to Sidhu, parents are not presented with the same question as a puzzle, with the answer “perfectly aligned” as if by a constellation of stars. For those without children, she wrote, it can lead to existential angst, and the subject has proved both a source of consternation and fascination among her child-free friends, becoming something of a black hole in conversation.
She raised the case of her 12-year-old goddaughter, who was one year old when Sidhu’s mother died and so does not remember her, and asked whether she could trust her to cherish the ring. Sidhu said she and her friends have wrestled with whether she would feel differently if the girl were her own daughter.
Sidhu wrote that she has seen enough episodes of Antiques Roadshow to know the world is full of people who cherish items that belonged to relatives they never met. If the ring passed to her goddaughter, she would be the last custodian who truly knew what it meant to her mother, she said, but a new relationship would be anchored to it. That realisation, she added, showed her sentimentality can still be passed down.
She said her concerns stemmed from trying to hold on to what is tangibly left of her mother, and that she had inadvertently been willing time to stop. She cited the philosopher Heraclitus, who said no man steps in the same river twice because it is not the same river and he is not the same man, noting that the lives of the first custodians of cherished objects become backstories.
Sidhu wrote that she will no longer be the ring’s custodian once she is gone and its meaning will alter with its new owner, describing this as how life works, in the exchange of hands. Acknowledging it, she said, brought her clarity and comfort.
She also described a conundrum among her child-free friends: one friend with two nieces and a nephew plans to leave what she has to the nephew because the nieces do not make an effort to be in her life. Sidhu wrote that the friend has been told this would cause strife among the siblings and that her plan is “inconsiderate”, and asked how much the feelings of others should be considered when writing a will.
Sidhu argued the contents of a will are not just “the last performance of our lives” but the lasting performance. Child-free people, she wrote, may choose recipients without being bound by expectation and tradition, but are more open to rigorous criticism because of that freedom, and the process is not as formulaic as leaving everything to children.
She noted that the artist David Hockney died without having had children but will leave a bigger legacy to the world than most, and said that as a writer her words might reach ten or a thousand people — more than the number of children she could have had. Through her words and the money she leaves to charity, she wrote, she will be a benefactor to many rather than a few.
Sidhu concluded that everyone leaves some form of legacy whether or not they have children, traces that whisper of a past existence, and that while she is not interested in a grandiose legacy, there is something beautiful about leaving a token of oneself in a world left behind.
Kiran Sidhu is a freelance journalist and writer, author of I Can Hear the Cuckoo, and wrote the Bafta award-winning documentary Heart Valley.
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