Legacy journaling differs from regular journaling in that in legacy journaling one writes for someone else. The writing of a legacy journal can be extracted from one’s journals and contains one’s life lessons, reflections, values and beliefs, and messages one chooses to share. It can also be a journal written specifically for someone.  For example, Merle began keeping journals for each of her granddaughters on the day they were born!

LIVING AND LEAVING MY LEGACY (Vol II)

MERLE R. SAFERSTEIN

https://merlersaferstein.com/

Imagine having a written record of your life—your thoughts, feelings, lessons learned, conversations, encounters, memories, dreams, travel adventures, and more.

In Living and Leaving My Legacy, Vol II, Merle R. Saferstein shares carefully curated excerpts from her journals. Each is a sampling of her life: friendship and relationships; death and dying; travel; Holocaust stories of survival; major news events; writing an ethical will and more. At the end of each chapter, she includes reflections and journal prompts that can inspire readers and deepen their own life journey.

As a legacy educator, Saferstein also offers suggestions to help the reader think about their legacy and instructions for ways to embark on a legacy project.

About the Author: As the director of educational outreach at the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center for twenty-six years, Merle Saferstein worked closely with hundreds of Holocaust survivors helping them to pass along their Legacy of Remembrance to hundreds of thousands of students and teachers. Upon retiring from the Holocaust Center, she developed a course entitled Living and Leaving Your Legacy® and teaches and speaks to audiences locally, nationally, and internationally. She trains hospice staff and volunteers to help patients leave their legacies and works closely with the patients at the end of their lives doing sacred legacy work. For many years, she has volunteered at a camp for children who experienced the death of a family member, while also facilitating a writing for wellness group at Gilda’s Club for women who have been impacted by cancer and working with Wisdom of the Century, a project that interviews individuals ninety years old and older. Merle is a council member of the International Association for Journal Writing, is the author of Room 732, a short story collection which pays homage to the historic Hollywood Beach Hotel and a B.R.A.G. Medallion Honoree, and is a contributor to the Huffington Post, Medium, Authority Magazine, Women Writers, Women’s Books, and Thrive Global. Merle was chosen as the 2019 Greater Miami Jewish Federation Volunteer of the Year.

HERE IS A Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR

What is legacy journaling?

Legacy journaling differs from regular journaling in that in legacy journaling one writes for someone else. The writing of a legacy journal can be extracted from one’s journals and contains one’s life lessons, reflections, values and beliefs, and messages one chooses to share. It can also be a journal written specifically for someone. In my case, I began keeping journals for each of my granddaughters on the day they were born.

Legacy journaling enriches our lives by providing:

·        An opportunity to impart wisdom.

·        New insights into a specific moment in time.

·        Deeper understanding of important people in our lives.

·        Historical documentation that can be passed on to future generations.

·        Preservation of important times and places.

·        Clarification and sharing of life lessons, values and beliefs, and hopes and dreams.

·        Sharing family history.

·        Keeping records of time spent with family members.

·        A basis for an ethical will.

Legacy journaling also:

·        Helps you appreciate what you’ve accomplished.

·        Helps you determine what matters to you.

·        Helps you to reflect on your life.

·        Captures one’s essence.

·        Records thoughts, feelings, accomplishments, challenges, gratitude, heritage, treasured moments, and advice.

·        Brings meaning and purpose.

·        Reinforces the important parts of one’s life.

·        Provides the family with something concrete to cherish after you are gone.

·        Is a gift you give to yourself.

And you teach legacy classes, tell us more about this.

I began teaching legacy classes in October 2013. At the time, the classes were eight-week sessions and have since been eight, six, and four-week sessions. I have taught a total of 68 classes to date.

The main objective of these classes is to help the participants look at their lives and how they are living them. We examine the following questions and more:

·        What life lessons have I learned?

·        What do I want to pass along? 

·        What do I hope people will remember about me and am I living my life so they will?

·        What gives my life meaning?

Together we explore the answers to these questions and many more. The premise of this legacy work is to examine one's life as we live it and determine what matters most and what we hope to leave behind for our loved ones. By the end of this interactive class, the participants are on their way to putting their priceless legacy into an ethical will, a legacy letter, a video interview, an annotated recipe book, a scrapbook, and/or more.

My first exercise in class is to have everyone list things that bring them joy. Then I ask a series of questions including when the last time these things were part of their life? The question to the participants is always are you doing what brings you joy? If not, why not?

Who might be interested in legacy journaling/or a legacy class?

Those interested in the legacy class vary. I have had classes and done workshops for the following:

·        Grandparents

·        Men and women from the ages of 38–92

·        Hospice staffs—particularly social workers, music and art therapists, and nurses

·        Those who enroll in the classes are willing to look at their lives and how they live them. Some want to leave a tangible legacy, like an ethical will or another legacy project.

·        Those who might tackle legacy journaling are individuals who journal and realize they might have something of value to pass along to their loved ones. In one case, I had a woman in one of my classes who had cancer. I suggested she journal, which she did. When her cancer metastasized and she was close to dying, she asked if she could send her journals to me to go through them and condense them for her five-year-old daughter to have someday. That is the epitome of a legacy journal. It was one of the most sacred acts I have performed.

You have an author’s quote, “How you live your life becomes your legacy.” What does it mean to you?

I believe it’s not what we say but what we do, the example we set, that people remember most. Our families and friends watch us and learn from how we are living and how we act.

While creating a legacy project to leave behind is lovely, people will remember us by how we showed up in our world. Recently, a 47-year-old man I know suddenly passed away. He was in his prime and certainly had been expecting to live a long life. It never occurred to him to do any type of legacy work. Yet, when he died, who he had been in his life, the people he touched, the work he did, and the way he helped others became his legacy. For me, this was a perfect illustration of my quote.

What have you included in the book that might help a reader with a legacy project? How can the average reader benefit from reading about legacy work?

In the chapter entitled Living and Leaving Your Legacy®, I wrote about a variety of exercises that I have done in my classes. This gives the reader a starting point to do some kind of legacy project. At the end of the book, I have included a listing with explanations of many legacy projects. Also, I have a list of projects for children who have lost loved ones to do in memory of that special person who had been in their lives. In addition to these, I include a two-page step-by-step guide to writing an ethical will. I’ve added a poem entitled Live Your Dash, which reminds the reader of the importance of living life in the moment and making our days matter.

I hope that when readers read Living and Leaving My Legacy, Vol. ll, they will look at my life as a mirror into their own. My goal is to help people live their best lives. Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Legacy work often requires introspection. By reading about legacy work and hopefully embarking on doing a legacy project, the readers will benefit by deciding what matters, what life lessons, values and beliefs, and hopes and dreams they might want to pass along in some form of legacy work. What I have learned is that while we think we are doing this for others, the true gift is the one we give ourselves by doing this work.

You’re known for your work with Holocaust survivors and have documented select stories in your book Living and Leaving My Legacy, Vol. l. How did you feel about hearing their stories? And why are they important to tell?

My job as the director of educational outreach at the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center was to help the survivors pass along their stories to students and teachers. Over the twenty-six years I was there, I had the privilege of working with hundreds of Holocaust survivors. Most important to them was the opportunity to share what they endured so this and future generations would remember and learn so as not to repeat another Holocaust.

It was difficult to listen to the horrific stories of torture, loss, and dehumanization. Yet, I knew it was my responsibility to pass along their messages. I often would sit with a survivor in my office committing to memory what they shared with me. At night, I would write in my journal to process everything I heard.

When I worked on my journal project, one of the topics I chose was Holocaust survivors. I did so because of the promise I made to the survivors to share their stories. That chapter is probably the most significant writing I will ever do. While it is difficult to read and absorb the cruelty these individuals experienced, I hope readers will learn and better understand what took place during the Holocaust.

In my work at the Holocaust Center, we interviewed Holocaust survivors beginning in 1980. Our center trained the people from Steven Spielberg’s Shoah project when they decided to interview survivors. The interviews were a legacy project, one of Legacy of Remembrance.

Tell us about your journaling experience – how did it start and why?

As a young teen, I wrote in diaries, but somehow those got lost in our family move. In 1974 as I was turning thirty, I began to journal. I liked to write and putting down my thoughts, feelings, experiences, and more felt right to me. My children were young, and I wanted to record that time in their lives as well as my experiences as a mother. I also had moved away from my hometown and didn’t have many friends for the first few years. My journals became my companions.

In September 1981, my closest friend divorced and had little time for me. At the same time, football season began, and my husband was engrossed in watching games every weekend. Suddenly, I had many hours without anyone around. That’s when my serious journaling began. From 1982 on, I journaled daily and sometimes multiple times a day. I currently have 380+ journals that I have filled over the past 48 years.

In 2000, I decided I couldn’t leave my journals to my children since I wrote them only for my eyes. It took me two years before I embarked on my journal project when I read every journal and took excerpts from them based on seventy subjects. That process took a total of fourteen years to complete. The topics had anywhere from 75–450 single-spaced, typewritten pages. It took another five years to whittle them down to twenty-two chapters with approximately thirty pages in each. The completed project is comprised of two volumes of Living and Leaving My Legacy.

Did you learn anything about yourself you didn’t know before reading your journals?

Above all else, I learned that who I am hasn’t changed. Some of my behaviors have but in reading my journals, I saw that I am the same person I have always been.

After reading my journals, I realized that because I had committed so much to paper, it helped me remember more than most people probably do. For example, in all my journals, there were only three incidents I wrote about that were not exactly the way I remembered them to be. I couldn’t recall memories of some people I had put in my journals, but that was rare.

I knew I was strongly determined, but I hadn’t realized to what extent that is true. Once I looked back on the project and saw how focused I had been on accomplishing it, I became aware of what a driven soul I am.

Before the summer of 2016 when I spent seventy-seven solitary days working on my journal project, if someone were to have asked me what percentage of my life experiences were positive and what percentage were negative, my answer would have been drastically different from today. Then I might well have said 91% positive—9% negative. That’s truly how I looked at my life. After this experience, if someone were to ask me, my answer would be closer to 50-50.

What I learned from that was that as I read the journals covering the periods from June 1999 until August 2012, I experienced many painful days, weeks, months, and even years dealing with a variety of difficult and heartbreaking issues. While I hadn’t forgotten any of them, how I processed them and what my attitude was throughout has made the difference in the lens through which I have viewed my life. From this vantage point, I could sit back and observe how I pulled myself up—how my resilient nature has been a gift throughout my life.

What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned from journal writing?

Long ago I was in therapy for a short period. When I finished the sessions, my therapist told me she had never had a client who knows herself as well as I do. She attributed it to my journaling. It is where I integrate my entire being.

I’ve learned that:

·        Journaling has helped me live in the moment.

·        Life ebbs and flows and nothing stays the same.

·        I can best understand my past, discover joy in the present, and create my future through writing.

·        By journaling, I clarify my goals.

·        There is great value of putting my thoughts and feelings down on paper.

·        It is a place where I can problem-solve and come up with solutions.

·        I have given myself a gift by recording my thoughts, feelings, experiences, and more.

The majority of people I’ve spoken to about keeping journals have said they write mostly when experiencing difficult times. Many have told me they’d never want to go back and read about those painful experiences. Some who have ventured to that place are quick to destroy their journals after knowing they have no desire to hold onto those unpleasant memories, and for sure, they would never want anyone else to see them. On the other hand, I treasure my journals and am grateful to have them regardless of what they contain.

What led you to do hospice work? Why did you choose death and dying as a topic in your book?

When Hurricane Andrew hit Miami, someone who lost her business told me the best thing she did was begin to volunteer in a homeless shelter. She suggested that as bad as she had it, others were struggling more. That planted a seed for me.

After that, when I was going through a difficult time in my life, I decided that I would volunteer. I saw an ad in the newspaper for a hospice volunteer training. I attended the training and became an active volunteer visiting patients in their homes.

For years, I sat with dying individuals. People would ask me why I was doing that, and my answer was always the same—because I can.

When I retired from the Holocaust Center, I learned that one of the hospice organizations in Miami was beginning to organize Camp Kangaroo, a weekend camp for children who lost people in their lives. Since I had been the director of a summer camp for children, I was able to help in many ways. I instituted journaling with the children ages five to eighteen. For several years, I have also facilitated the all-day session with the campers’ parents.

The legacy projects I did with those dying were among the most profound work of anything I’ve done. It led me to do legacy training workshops for hospice staffs including nurses, social workers, music and art therapists, and volunteers.

I recently participated in a bereavement initiative training for the South Florida community. Our goal is to create greater support for those who are grieving.

I chose to include a chapter on death and dying because it has become a subject I am most interested in. I believe many lessons can be learned from those who are dying, and working with hospice patients has brought great meaning to my life. Above all, I have learned that we all want to know we matter.