Write the letter

For a thousand years, Jewish fathers and mothers have written letters to their children to be read after their deaths. Not wills, which divide property. Ethical wills, which pass on what the property can't hold: what I believed, what I learned, what I hope for you, what I'm sorry for, what I want you to remember. The oldest surviving ones are medieval. The practice was revived in the 1990s and spread far beyond the tradition that began it, and it's now called, often, a legacy letter.

Part of my work is the first kind of will, and I'll tell you the second kind matters more. The estate plan takes care of the money. The letter takes care of the people. Families fight over houses. They don't fight over letters, because a letter says what the house can't: here is who I was, and here is what I wanted for you.

It's the center of this chamber. Meaning, by Making. You can make a lot of things in a life, and most of them won't outlast you. A letter will. And the act of writing it does something to the writer now: it forces the question of what, in all of this, actually mattered. People who write an ethical will tend to live differently afterward. They've seen the summary.

You don't have to be old. You don't have to be dying. You have to be willing to sit down and ask what you'd want the people you love to know if you couldn't tell them. Most of us have never written a single sentence of it.