Writing Down a Recipe For a Life Worth Living

Ethical Wills Provide a Chance To Pass Along Heritage of Values

On Faith appears the first Sunday of each month.

Monroe Singer's "New Year Greetings to My Family" has graced the Reston home of Sally Singer Horwatt for years. A scant eight paragraphs, it was written in the chill of a 1945 Chicago winter as war ravaged the world.

To his second daughter, 4-year-old Sally, Singer wrote: "Happiness should come easy for you because you give so much joy to all of us. My wish for you in this New Year is my wish for all your life -- Happiness, Health and a gracious spirit that you may continue to give to all those around you the joy you have given to me."

Horwatt's father, a high school dropout at 15, was a salesman who died in 1966 at the age of 64. Today, she treasures what he wrote to his wife and three children more than anything else he left behind because "it's contact with my father, with his humanity. It expresses his values."

What Horwatt, 63, has always called "Dad's letter" is an example of what is now commonly called an ethical will, a document that bequeaths to loved ones a spiritual, rather than material, legacy.

Increasingly popular in recent years, ethical wills usually describe the moral or religious values people have strived to live by, the important life lessons they have learned and the kind of life they wish for their children. These wills also can include stories about events and people that shaped the author's life, as well as regrets and acts for which the writer seeks forgiveness.

Ethical wills carry no legal status. Their value is more in the wisdom they pass to the living. And for their authors, they are a tangible way of being remembered.

"It's really an attempt to share and to some extent shape what your legacy will be by putting on paper or into words . . . how you see yourself . . . functioning in the world and what you hold dear and why you hold it dear," said the Rev. Robert Washington, chaplain at Montgomery Hospice in Rockville.

Barry K. Baines, author of "Ethical Wills: Putting Your Values on Paper" and associate medical director of Hospice of the Twin Cities in Minneapolis, said the concept "speaks to something just below the surface: transcendence."

"We all want to be remembered, to leave something behind," he said. "An ethical will becomes a very important way to at least leave a spiritual legacy on into the future."

The practice has become more widespread in recent years with the help of books and Web sites promoting it. But experts also cite an increased awareness of life's fragility after Sept. 11, 2001, and, before that, the AIDS epidemic.

Washington, who has ministered to dying people since 1984, recalled how mothers dying of AIDS were particularly eager to write something for their children. "Every mother believes she is the best person to instill values in her children," he said. "So these mothers would be especially heartbroken and would write letters."

But ethical wills are not just for the dying.

Have integrity. Your yes should mean yes, your no should mean no. Be the person you say you are. When you peel a banana have you ever gotten anything other than a banana? That is what integrity is, being on the inside who you say you are on the outside. It is not always easy but it is always valuable.