It is hard for many people to imagine their body as a living thing that will some day cease to live. From our earliest memories, most of us can recall the thrill of swinging a little too high, the dizziness from spinning in circles, the exhaustion of a foot race.
We are, in so many ways, our bodies. And yet, those bodies will ultimately no longer support all that is not our bodies: thoughts, consciousness, spirit, imagination.
One of the ways that my clients find some resolution with the mind/body divide, especially toward the end of their lives, is to preserve that which they can: their memories. The creative work that goes into constructing a Legacy Project helps the dying person–and by extension the dying person’s loved ones–come to terms with the inevitable decay of the corpus and the promise of legacy through the documentation of a life.
Wisest Path 