Dr. BARRY BAINES (Author, ETHICAL WILLS -- PUTTING YOUR VALUES ON PAPER, at lecture): How many of you were familiar with what an ethical will is? So, it's really very few. What we'll do today is get you steeped into what ethical wills are all about.
BETTY ROLLIN: Dr. Barry Baines, a family-practice physician, conducts workshops on ethical wills all over the country -- not only for church groups like this one in St. Paul, Minnesota, but for financial planners and estate attorneys. He's even written a "how-to" book about them.
Ethical wills are letters written by anyone at any age to anyone, but mostly to children and grandchildren, expressing the writers' values, blessings, faith, life's lessons and stories, and sometimes instructions.
Dr. BAINES: I want you to read the ethical will that says "Dear family & friends." So, would anybody like to share what they read in terms of what they thought the ethical will was about or impressions?DEBRA DREW: Instructions for how to live their life.
ROLLIN (to Ms. Drew): Why are people doing this?
Ms. DREW: So often we get caught up in the day-to-day whirlwind, and I think my children don't know me as I would like them to know me.I started a letter to my daughter when she was born 13 years ago. I look back on that letter, and I think to add to it because it's very different writing a letter to an infant.
PHIL KOPITSKE: All the questions you wish you could ask of your grandparents and great grandparents that you can't ask are going to one day be asked about you. Having had a grandfather who I know very little about and always wanted to have known more about him, it makes me not to want to make the same mistake of being an enigma to my descendents.DON BERGLAND: We don't have a lot to pass on monetarily, we don't have millions of dollars to pass on, but I think something like this is just as important.
ROLLIN: Dr. Baines launched his program as the result of working in a hospice with patients who, in their last days, felt the need to express themselves.
Dr. BAINES: I have not encountered one person yet who hasn't told me that the level of peace of mind that they achieved by writing this is just amazing. They talk about a burden being lifted off their shoulders.
ROLLIN (to Dr. Baines): And how should one not write an ethical will?
Dr. BAINES: I think the worst kind of ethical will is the ethical will that guilt-trips survivors, reaches out from the grave blaming things that happened to the writer on other people. It doesn't mean that ethical wills need to be sanitized to the point that someone would read it and have no sense of this is the person who had wrote it.ROLLIN: The concept of ethical wills goes back to the Hebrew Bible when a dying Jacob gathered his sons around him to tell them how they should live. Before he died, Moses made a farewell address to his people. And in the New Testament in the Gospel of John, Jesus' departing advice to his disciples was a kind of a ethical will.
Ms. FREED: When Jacob gathered his sons, Jacob had a daughter. It doesn't say anything about Dina being blessed by her father before he died. Women, like men, need to be remembered -- to make a contribution for their lives, to have made a difference, to be witnessed, to belong -- and the ethical will can do all of those things.
MARY SMALL (reading from will): May you be blessed with a generous heart that accepts your own treasure as finally enough. Or, perhaps even more than you expected. Humility brings gratefulness; may it visit you everyday. I think I would prefer to be cremated, although if this offends you or others whose concerns and thoughts are important to you, bury me.
(to women's support group): May your spiritual, ethical will be an eternal link between you and those you love.
