Ethical Will – a few thougths

I have been thinking of writing an Ethical Will for a few years.  It started as an afterthought in thinking of writing the story of my life.  If you don’t know what an ethical will is, there are some good websites that I won’t try to summarize, but rather point you to this one from Celebrations of Life.

So being that writing is one of my weakest strengths, I thought that maybe instead of writing a ‘Ethical Will’ I would do a multi media version of it.  In thinking of this, I realized  I did something like this when I created a CD for my sister’s Celebration of Life party.  It was pictures of my family in a slide show with some background music from my Dad’s CD, which BTW is a ethical will of sorts that I’ll talk about later.  Dawn’s CD was a picture story of her life. It was broken up into 10 year segments from 1942 to 2010, the year before she died. The telling picture is the look on her face when she first saw the slide show video at her party.

Here is a  segment from that slid show video.

The music in that video was from my dad’s CD titled: “The John Wood Combo – Live”. It is one of the most precious CDs I have as well as one of the nicest things I’ve ever got from my dad.  He communicated his ethical will with his music. The only time I saw him write anything was a letter to me that I recently received from my ex-wife when she was cleaning our some old files.  His was of expressing himself was though his Saxophone. He played by ear,  and was self taught in the big band era.  He played for a  big band in the early 40’s until his sense of responsibility caused him to give up the irregular work of playing a sax for working in a ‘regular’ job in factory called IBM. He sold his saxophone and never played until almost 30 years later after retired from IBM.  He loved playing and used it to communicate his passion and heart.

So, I’m not sure I have to write an ‘Ethical Will’. I may have already done that with this blog. 

I’ll give this more thought.