|
|
Genetically, I think, I got just about equal portions of my parents. So did my sister, though different portions in many places. If there's one thing I'd like to have got from my mother genetically, it would have been the old trope about inheriting your maternal grandfather's hair: when he died a few years ago 3 weeks shy of his 95th birthday, he had, if not a full head of hair, as full a head of hair as a nearly 95 year old man can be expected to have. Me, I'm going bald in roughly the same manner as my dad did.
In terms of personality, yeesh, that's a minefield right there. There's really nothing about my mother's personality I wish to have inherited that I haven't already, and quite a bit of it I wish I hadn't. She's an intelligent, cultured woman who unfortunately is also of the mental stability of the proverbial outhouse rat. My dad, while also deranged, is, for the most part, entertainingly, benevolently so. It should come as a surprise to no one that my sister and I are both a bit whacked ourselves. We are fortunately self-aware enough that we celebrate those aspects of such that make us idiosynchratic and try to sand down those that are less flattering. Given the raw materials we had to work with our respective levels of adjustment are nearly heroic, especially my sister's.
As for material possessions, my dad, while comfortable, has nothing specific that I'm looking to inherit; if he enjoys many more decades of life that would be the greatest legacy. My mother, on the other hand, has acquired everything of value to her name by great personal compromise and isolation, to the extent that it all reeks of spiritual death. There is just about nothing physical I can think of that I would want that she could give me, and I think I'd be tempted to burn whatever she did.
/+, |
|
|