the beautiful end

✨ on leaving a Forever Letter in your will ✨

My latest library haul tells a story. The titles:

• Jane Brody’s Guide to the Great Beyond

• Caring for the Dying: The Doula Approach to a Meaningful Death by Henry Fersko-Weiss

• The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life by Katy Butler

• Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

• How to Say Goodbye by Wendy MacMaughton

I have mortality on my mind. (Count on me to be pondering end of life in the sun-kissed days of June.) I don't have news to share, rather, a friend sparked this line of inquiry for me. I’ll explain.

Recently, I met up with my friend, Andrea, for tea. Andrea is a life-coach (a very good one) by trade, and our relationship is a mutual mentorship. Meaning, we both vacillate between mentor and mentee for each other, because we have a mutual, non-hierarchical understanding that each one has something to learn from the other. We meet on each month’s last Friday to check in on the highs and lows of our respective businesses and lives. She asks questions that consistently move the needle of my professional and personal growth.

I shared with her a brewing idea to support moms in their memory-keeping and scrapbooking efforts. She logged it.

We then got talking about my writing—and my persistent love of capturing bittersweet moments of human becoming and parenthood with words—and she asked me what kind of feedback I get on my writing. I recalled a favorite bit from a reader who said in response to this piece, “you’re able to put the perfect words to feelings that I intimately relate to, but am unable to express myself.” With each piece I publish, some wonderful reader (and also, always, my mom) emails me with a sentiment of that kind, which keeps me motivated to publish these weekly vignettes, because I trust that writing about the vulnerable experience of being human may help others better know themselves and navigate their forward growth.

Andrea digested that, and offered an idea.

Have you ever considered helping parents like me (her kids are grown) craft a personal statement or scrapbook to accompany their wills?

Um, no. I hadn’t. No such thing has ever crossed my mind. I asked her to go on.

She talked about her experience with will writing and estate planning, both from the perspective of planning ahead for her own death, and in the wake of her mom’s death last year. Having a will drawn up is a necessary component of aging, yet a rather cut-and-dry legal process that focuses on assets, financial worth and the transference of ownership and guardianship. It’s all business; nothing sentimental about it.

Andrea shared that she’d like to include in her will a letter to her kids, something that they'd read before immersing in all the nitty gritty of inheritance—that captures their relationships, through her eyes, and what raising, knowing and loving each one has meant to her; maybe even a highly curated scrapbook—but she feels a bit stuck in finding the words.

She introduced me to the concept of an ethical will, a practice that has existed for millennia but is an uncommon practice in the modern age of end of life preparations. Online research taught me that ethical wills, also called legacy letters, are a place to capture one’s personal values, beliefs, love, gratitude and apologies. But nowhere have I read about a practice of encapsulating one’s experience of parenthood in a direct love letter to one’s child.

Andrea's suggestion washed over me, and I was overcome with the thought that in an ideal world, every kid, at any age, would receive (what I’m calling) a Forever Letter in the wake of their parental loss, composed by that parent when they had clarity of mind. A letter that serves and endures as a final act of parenting and love.

And, also, I’ve discovered that I feel compelled to intentionally carve space for this blatantly absent component of one's worth in a will… the worth of who you’ve been and how you’ve loved (not just what you have). A lifetime of parental love and devotion means something and has supreme value. I want to help honor that.

So I went to the library and got the stack of books. I ordered a few online on writing ethical wills. I was thrilled to learn that my local library offers an end of life workshop seasonally. (I’ve signed up for the next one.) I carefully started talking to people about their death preparations. No one had considered leaving a Forever Letter as part of their will. But, it became clear, they hadn’t considered it because the idea was unfamiliar; but now, with their new awareness of Forever Letters as an option, they want to write one to include in their wills.

Then, I just happened to listen to this episode of Smartless, where Jeremy Renner speaks about his brush with death, and my mom gushed about her bookclub book, which chronicles the life of a man named Charlie, who lived to 109 and kept with him, until the end, a love letter that his mom wrote him at 21.

I took these all as signs, and now I’m happy to share with you, members of this readership and the Everwell community: I want to help parents express themselves in their Forever Letters. As an impassioned writer—a former English teacher—who values meaningful connection, direct communication, inner worth, intentionality, and family above all else… this idea was meant to find me. Forever Letters strike me as a natural extension to Everwell’s offerings.

I will begin offering and promoting my Forever Letter Writing services come Fall, but in the meantime, I’m offering the service to a small sampling of willing people this summer at half-rate, as I fine-tune the process.

If you’re interested (or if you have a parent whom you’d like to encourage to be interested) and would like to learn more, email me at lindsay@theeverwell.com or message me below, and we’ll discuss.

As always, sending you love as you journey forward from here.

xo Lindsay 

P.S. Here’s another way I can support your growth today… cozy up for fireside stories on Becoming Everwell with Linds.