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Boles’ Legacy Work Recognized in NYT Best-Seller

Posted by on Thursday, January 23, 2025 in Uncategorized.

In the words of Dr. Boles:

“Grade school me was fascinated by legacy, whether seemingly mundane moments carrying deep meaning or the fleeting and sacred nature of stories and shared experiences. Legacy, for me, was the sound of my grandmother’s voice, the joy of helping my grandfather “fix” things, and the wonder I felt the first time I touched a starfish.

As I aged, learned, and eventually engaged in clinical work as a child life specialist, legacy became even more present, fragile, and awe-inspiring. Instead of my own relationships and memories, legacy emerged from poignant and privileged interactions with children and adolescents facing terminal cancer. Legacy became how a young teen wore sunglasses in clinic on the days he expected “bad news,” a 10-year-old girl’s refusal to speak (over two years) as one of the few choices she could make during treatment. Legacy was learning to play guitar with a blue-haired teen boy who once communicated in song but now remains in memory. Legacy was these moments, connections, feelings, realizations… and not the tangible plaster-poured keepsakes – hand molds – made at time of death.

I spent six years of doctoral study and 15+ years of clinical practice embracing the limitations of tangible craft in representing the essence of legacy as personhood and connection. Luckily, I found allies in colleagues, co-researchers, graduate students, pediatric patients, and their families inspiring years of legacy-focused research. Research that allowed me to cross paths with Craig Kielburger and the Martin Luther King III family.

We can most simply understand legacy as the manifestations and effects of our individual personhood, in life, death, and beyond. It is always, already, transformative, certainly beginning in life, rather than death. On this Martin Luther King Jr. day, we honor another critical act of legacy: resistance. Dr. King led an entire movement resisting the status quo, the way things had always been, in favor of a new reality in which race was no longer prerequisite for value, power, personhood. Recently we spoke with parents of children with medical complexity, children often unable to speak in traditional, vocal ways and who rely upon technology to perform tasks like breathing, sitting, eating.  There we heard a similar sentiment: legacy is resistance to misconceptions about ability/disability, refusal to accept the limits others impose or expect. As one mother shared, “Legacy is both what you leave behind and what you live right now.”

It is NOT an art piece on the highest shelf.

With incredible gratitude to My Legacy, The King Family Foundation, and all who felt my work and words important enough to share pages with Dr. King, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Melinda French Gates, and Reverend Al Sharpton… it’s an honor to stand in the shadows of what you are living and leaving right now.” legacy childlife honored childlife childlifespecialist

“What is My Legacy?” can be found on Amazon.com and wherever books are sold. 

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