Some of the best legacies aren’t money. They’re recipes, jokes and Sunday traditions someone keeps alive.

What actually survives a person is usually small and domestic. The way a dish gets made, a phrase everybody repeats, the thing your family does on a particular afternoon; those travel further than property and cost nothing to pass on. Inheritance gets discussed as though it were only financial, when most of what people carry from their grandparents is nothing of the kind. Keeping something going is itself a form of giving.

Learn one thing from an older person in your family while it is still available. How the food is made, or where a story came from. Write it down while you can still ask.