A few days ago, during a week of glorious achievements and legendary finishes, I received a quiet portion of an early inheritance. The twenty-four-year-old Bible was passed over to me at lunch. I carried the book home with me and opened it up this weekend, glancing over the handwritten commentary on pages, the post-it notes inside the cover. “This, my Bible, is for Stephanie,” one of them read, dated September 2004.

How much do we think about what we will leave behind?

I watched an interview with Kerri Strug, whose injury-blighted performance on the vault in 1996 led the US Women’s team to all-around gold. The same performance that won the gold left her with a sprain and some tendon damage and ended her competitive gymnastics career. I hear stories like this, narrated by The Husband’s arch enemy Bob Costas during these Games, and I wonder what makes some people protect themselves at all costs while others choose to give until it hurts.

Then I look at my son and I think I’m learning the answer.

Will we leave behind stories, or arguments? Custody battles over stuff, or relationships intact? And while we’re here, how do we become the kind of people we want to be known as after we’re gone?

These are not choices made just on the floor of a gym or behind the closed door of an attorney’s office; they are the summation of a million choices made over thousands of days; there will be mistakes, to be sure, and plenty of them; but in the end, the choices lead either to the ultimate no or the ultimate yes: will I live for myself? Or will I live for–and leave behind–more?

The Bible’s leather is cracked and wearing; the pages are warped with turning. There are notes that don’t make sense in light of some of the things I’ve seen. But if it’s the last piece of the pie that I receive, that will be enough. Hasn’t that whole “money buying happiness” theorem been disproven? Don’t people matter more than things? If bitterness and enmity are my choice for a legacy, then I can achieve them immediately and easily. But I want my life to tell a story, and I don’t want it to be a cautionary tale. I want my son to know what matters, and so I choose the more even when it hurts, even when it feels like less. Because it never is.