Some Parting Advice

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Interest endures in the ancient tradition of writing "ethical wills"

Karen Russell's first husband, Michael Press, often left her notes -- in her shoes, inside a cereal box. She was likely to pick up the toilet seat and find a short, irreverent poem. A few months after Press died in 1982 at age 29, the victim of a drunk driver, Russell was cleaning her guest bathroom when she found a piece of paper covered with his tiny script at the bottom of a Kleenex box. It was not one of his gags, but a letter that began: "You, Karen, are a special jewel in the universe." Press had composed the note expecting to watch his wife live out her dreams, but what he planted under the tissues turned out to be his last testament to her. "Never doubt yourself, for you possess marvelous talents," he had written.

"It was an amazing connection to him, this one last communication," says Russell, who founded the nonprofit National Grief Support Services more than a decade ago to honor her late husband's memory. "In that moment, I realized how powerful it would be if I could bring that comfort to other people."

Without knowing it, Press had written an ethical will. An ancient practice with deep roots in the religions of the West, the writing of ethical wills is hardly recognized today; like Press, many who create them do so instinctively rather than formally.

In their simplest form, ethical wills are letters, usually addressed to grown children, recounting family history and expressing hope that the writer will be remembered for certain values. At their most urgent, they are the letters soldiers write that begin, "If I don't make it home, I want you to know . . ." As the name suggests, ethical wills are intended to be spiritual counterparts to the legal documents that dispose of our worldly effects after our deaths. The undeniable assumption inherent in ethical wills is that we are more than the sum of our material parts, and we should pass along the intangibles the way we do cash or stock.

For many years, those undergoing what is called a "mindful death" often have written formal ethical wills. Hospice workers have long used such letters as a therapeutic tool for patients and their survivors. Video and the Internet have made it possible for those stricken with cancer and other sometimes fatal illnesses to collect their thoughts in pictures, songs, and art. Russell is completing an area on the National Grief Support Services Web site where both the dying and their survivors can record multimedia messages.

Ironically, it is the way we live rather than how we die that has made ethical wills more popular recently. "We're spread out all over the world," Russell says. "Kids don't grow up near their grandparents anymore. Ethical wills are a way to have continuity when we don't live with each other." The phenomenon of sudden wealth also is driving some to consider what Michael J.A. Smith, a managing director of Bankers Trust Private Banking, a part of Deutsche Bank Group in New York, calls "social capital." In the wake of huge success, says Smith, his clients "feel the need to come to some agreement about who they are and how they want their descendants to interact with society. The patriarch or matriarch often wants to come up with a family mission statement," tantamount to an ethical will.

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