Creating Your Elderly Loved One's Legacy

There is a new trend beginning in the elderly population, and it is focused on leaving a part of the elderly person’s life and wisdom behind after they pass. It’s a hard thing to face, but your elderly loved ones will not be around forever. However, it can be easy to get caught up in the minutia of daily life, and to forget the amount of wisdom and knowledge that your elderly loved ones have. Chances are they’ve lived through war, they’ve seen huge changes in societal values, vast leaps in technologies, and they’ve interacted with hundreds of individuals within their lifetimes. All of this experience translates into a vast amount of wisdom. It’s important to not let all of this wisdom go without attention; so many individuals are creating legacies with their elderly loved ones.

What is a legacy? It is a record of an individual’s memories, experiences, advice, personality, and life. It is their history, and it’s recorded in some form so that their families, friends and future relatives can learn from it.

How can you start a legacy with your elderly loved one? Here are some guidelines for starting the legacy:

First, develop your goals. What do you and your elderly loved one want to achieve by doing this? Is the goal to help guide and advise any future grandchildren? Is it simply to leave an impression about who your elderly loved one is, as an individual?

Secondly, create interview questions and a plan to guide and develop the legacy. One of the most basic things you can do is to write down some questions about their life. What was their first memory? What was it like growing up in that decade? What is their most vivid memory? Here is a list of questions from Answers4Families.org that is a great starting point for developing your own interview with your senior loved one.

Once you’ve developed the questions, you can begin to decide which medium you would like to record this on. For example, you can videotape your elderly loved one answering the questions or telling a story. You can have them handwrite a letter to their families. You can record them and pair it with the writing. There are so many different things you can do, so you can be creative in determining this.

Lastly, decide what they would like to do with the legacy. Would they like to show it to the family now? Would they like to wait until after they pass?

These are just some basic suggestions that are meant to be a starting point for you and your elderly loved one. Here are some web resources to use:

The Legacy Project

Here are a collection of essays and wisdom that the Cornell School of Human Ecology has collected. There is some great wisdom here and a lot of inspiration for your own legacy work!

ParentGiving

Here is some more information about what a legacy is, and how to begin one within your own family.

Answers4Families: Creating a Family Legacy

Here is some more information about what a legacy is.