$2500
8 hours of life story interviewing (audio recorded)
2 hours of legacy project brainstorming/planning
4 hours of legacy project completion support
End of Life Doulas offer extensive support in activities that many people find deeply meaningful: life review and legacy projects.
Legacy projects offer a powerful way to transform end of life wishes into action—a process of purposefully creating something for the people you love and care about. These projects can take all kinds of shapes: a memoir, a recipe collection, a photo album, letters to loved ones, a painting, a quilt, a handknit scarf, a poem or song, a time capsule, a garden, or recordings of you, narrating your life story or messages for loved ones. Legacy work is an active way to care for those you will leave behind, and as such, it can be a powerful coping tool not only for you, but for the people that care about you.
Life review is a process of recollecting, evaluating, and attributing meaning to our experiences, our memories—particularly helpful in times of significant change. And the end of life is most definitely a time of significant change! As such, life review is a wonderful path to finding meaning and a sense of wholeness during what can be a very hard time.
Life review activities can include: life story interviews, autobiographical writing, in-person storytelling, letters of advice for younger generations, genealogy work, or keeping a private journal of your reflections.
A life story interview is an exploration of your life: the adventures and the relationships, the important choices and the hard lessons, the big events and the routines of everyday life, the ups and the downs. It is my job as interviewer to guide you through the richness of your life experiences- it is your job to enjoy the exploration. These audio-recorded sessions let you focus on telling your story, without the need to compose your prose or type up your manuscripts. I offer the support of a specially-trained professional interviewer with years of experience in end-of-life care.
People often wish to have meaningful interactions with each other at the end of life, but it can be hard to figure out how to make that happen. The exploration of life stories contained in our interview recordings often work as an inspiration and even a catalyst for richer interactions at end of life– topics for conversation and shared reminiscences that emphasize connection, move interactions beyond the superficial, and focus on the life of the dying person, rather than their death process.
After a person is gone, these audio recordings can be a valuable part of the mourning process and a ‘piece’ of that person their loved ones can revisit as time passes. Just as photographs serve to preserve and remind us of what our loved ones looked like and moments we shared, these audio recordings preserve and remind us how they sounded: their voices, their laughter, the rhythm and cadence of their speech, the subtle but familiar intonations that reflect emotion.
Explore your life story and craft your legacy with an interviewer equipped with specialized training and years of experience working in palliative/hospice care.