Leaving Your Legacy

I discovered the importance of legacy letters, once called ethical wills, from a sidebar in the AARP magazine.  These are documents you write in your own words, often to leave to your family to be read after you're gone.  Or they can be letters to someone on a special occasion--to a newborn, to a new graduate, to a couple on their wedding.  Maybe you've always thought that someday you are going to do this, but somehow you've never gotten around to it.  Don't wait!  

I have been giving Legacy Letter workshops for the past several years, and they never fail to inspire.  In June, I'll be doing one for the West University Senior Center.  If you're around, I hope you'll come.

Here is an example of my favorite legacy letter of all the many I've read.  It was written by Sam Levinson, a former high school math teacher who became a beloved stand-up comic:

     To my children and children everywhere:

I leave you my unpaid debts.  Everything I own, I owe:

To America I owe the opportunity to be free and to be me.

To my parents I owe America.  They gave it to me and I leave it to you.  Take good care of it.

To the biblical tradition I owe the belief that man does not live by bread alone, nor does he live alone at all.  This is also the democratic tradition.  Preserve it.

To the six million of my people and the thirty million other humans who died because of man's inhumanity to man, I owe a vow that it must never happen again.

I leave you not everything I never had but everything I had in my lifetime:  a good family, respect for learning, compassion for my fellow man and some four letter words for all occasions: words like help, give, care, feel and love.