The Human Side of Estate Planning: Passing Down Who You Are

What estate planning covers

I have practiced estate planning and elder law for more than thirty years, in Pennsylvania and Florida. The work always involves money. Who inherits, and when. How to reduce costs and taxes. How to keep a family out of court, and how to keep brothers and sisters speaking to each other after the paperwork is done. Reducing friction between family members is as much a part of the job as any tax calculation.

That work matters, and I take it seriously. But it is not the whole of what a family hands down.

What families are really asking

Sit in enough planning meetings and you notice a second conversation running under the first. While we talk about accounts and deeds, people talk about their parents. Where the family came from. Why a grandfather left one country for another. Which recipe came from which side. What a mother believed about work, or money, or forgiveness.

Many families, when you get past the documents, want to know their heritage. They want to know who they come from, not only what they will receive.

The regret I hear most

The regret clients voice most often is not about their own story. It is about the generation before them: the parents and grandparents they never got around to asking. The question they meant to ask about the war, the farm, the first marriage, the brother nobody mentioned. I have heard some version of that across a conference table more times than I could count. Most of us assume there will be another holiday to ask it.

Documents and stories

Here is the distinction I have come to rely on. Documents protect what a family owns. Stories protect who the family is.

A will can pass down a house. It cannot pass down why that house mattered, or what happened at the kitchen table on the night someone decided to buy it. A trust can hold a family business. It cannot hold the reasons the business was started, or the lessons learned when it nearly failed.

Recording a family’s memories, its history, its philosophies and the lessons its members learned, and passing them down for generations, is what I call the human side of estate planning. It is not legal work. It needs no lawyer. But it deserves the same seriousness we give the documents, because it is the part of the inheritance the grandchildren will actually read.

How to start

Do not make it a project. Projects get scheduled for next summer. Make it a conversation instead: one question, asked with real interest, at a time when nobody is in a hurry.

Ask about something specific. Not “tell me about your life,” which is too big for anyone to answer, but “what was the house you grew up in like?” or “how did you two meet?” Then ask about whatever they mention in the answer. The second question is where the stories are. There are good starting questions here.

Write down what you hear, or record it, and keep it somewhere the whole family can find. If you are the one with the stories, start with your own. The people who come after you will want to know who you were, not only what you left them.

What the elders used to do

For most of human history, the elders of a community were the people everyone went to. Not because they were old, but because they had already lived through what the young were only beginning to face. They had raised children, buried parents, lost work and started over. They had made mistakes and paid for them. When a younger person stood in front of a hard choice, they went to someone who had already made it.

That role has thinned out. Families are spread across a dozen states, advice comes from a search engine, and the person at the end of the table who has lived eighty years often goes unasked. It isn’t for lack of caring. Nobody thought to ask.

Family history matters: where you came from, who married whom, why the family settled where it did. But the more valuable inheritance may be what a life taught. How to treat people who can do nothing for you. What to do when money runs short. How to keep a marriage going through the hard years. What being a good neighbor and a good citizen asks of a person. You learned those lessons the hard way. Written down, they can help a grandchild become a better person without having to learn every one of them the same way.

You now have the chance to do for your own family what the elders always did, and to put it somewhere it will last. Not as a lecture. Tell it in stories: the time you got it wrong, the person who set you straight, the decision you would make again. I built MyLifeMemoir so that anyone can do that just by talking. However you do it, do it. Somebody you love is going to need what you know.

About the author

Carl B. Zacharia is an estate planning and elder law attorney, admitted in Pennsylvania and Florida, with Zacharia Frey in Bonita Springs, Florida. He is president of Senior Care Resources and the founder of MyLifeMemoir. More about Carl.

MyLifeMemoir is a nonlegal family-legacy platform and does not provide legal advice.