The Gift of Love and Touch

• While hugs may be a breach of comfort for some families, hugs, holding hands, an embrace to the arm, a pat, can all communicate love and care. Much research has substantiated the necessity of touch for babies to thrive, and studies support similar findings for affirming the love and affection for any one and everyone, but is especially confirming for an ill or dying person.

The Gift of Legacy

• Legacy Notes: If a loved one is able to even dictate their deepest wishes, thoughts of family, history, culture, or wisdom and loving expression to family members, doing so is a lovely message and keepsake for each recipient. A friend, family member or caregiver can write down the dying member’s sentiments to a spouse, each child, grandchild, friend or other family members to be disbursed at the holiday event, or before or after the death of the loved one.
• The loving gesture can also be prepared in advance by each in the family to the ill or dying family member, and read later by them or to them at a quiet time. Each family member may wish to express a special memory, a heart-felt expression about their relationship, and a lesson or bit of wisdom they gleaned from their loved one’s life.
• A project for children might be to help decorate a box with old holiday cards in which to keep all the legacy notes and letters collected, even adding photos and other keepsakes of the day.
• When the loved one has been a member of various fraternal organizations, or church groups, it would be a nice gesture to allow members to write a similar brief note or remembrance to be collected and passed on and shared with their dying friend.
• When we think of leaving a legacy we may often think of the passing on of land or valuables. What is valuable to us and has meaning for us may be the story behind our favoring a particular object. I have a very old floral box that contains a brush, mirror and comb set. It has a note inside written in my grandmother’s handwriting. The note reads, “Von got this for me the first Christmas we were going together” followed by a date in the late 1800s. At a wedding shower my daughter was given a recipe box that held dozens of my mother’s recipes in her handwriting. My mother had passed away 17 years previous and this was, indeed, a precious keepsake.
• There may be a grandson in the family who has taken up fishing, and for whom an old, but favored fishing fly may be a perfect legacy to pass on. That fly may have a fishing story to write down and accompany it as a gift to this family member. Collected items as they are may seem like just things to others, but when the explanation and history of the item is shared, it may become something heartfelt to pass on to another generation. As families become smaller it becomes all the more important to retain a sense of family history.