I am grateful to all those who helped in my life’s journey.

Some of it can never be repaid, because you don't know who did it. The teacher who argued for you in a meeting. Whoever decided not to mention the thing that would have sunk you at nineteen. Help is often invisible by design.

And some of the people you could thank are gone, which leaves a debt with nowhere to send the payment.

The old convention here is a sound one: you don't pay it back, you pass it along. Do for someone junior, or lost, or twenty-five, what somebody once did for you without announcing it.

That's the only settlement available, and it works.