Legacy Letters and Ethical Wills Editing and Proofreading Services

A man writing a letter to be opened after his death has drafted three pages of advice: work hard, marry well, save your money, be kind to your mother. He is seventy-one and has a daughter who has heard none of this from him while he was alive to say it. What she will actually want, when she opens this letter years from now, is not instructions on how to live. It is him — his voice, one more time, saying something only he could have said to her.

We edit what people write to pass on values, memory and blessing rather than money or property — ethical wills and legacy letters, letters to be opened after death or at a future milestone, letters written during a terminal diagnosis, blessings and letters for a child's wedding or eighteenth birthday written years in advance, letters accompanying an inheritance explaining the reasoning behind it, and the letter someone writes to a future grandchild they will not meet. Our editors work on the last thing someone will ever say to another person.

The address to one specific reader is what makes this kind of letter work, and its failure is advice general enough to have been written to anyone. Work hard and be kind could be said to a stranger. We work through these so the letter speaks to this one person by name, referring to something true and particular about them, since generic wisdom is available anywhere and this letter is valuable only because of who it is from; so instruction is replaced by story wherever possible, given that "I learned to forgive people slowly, and here is the time it cost me not to" carries further than a rule about forgiveness stated as a rule; so what is actually being given is named plainly — not just advice, but permission, forgiveness, gratitude, or an apology the writer never managed out loud, because these letters usually contain one of those and pretending it is only wisdom wastes the one chance to say the real thing; so regrets are named honestly rather than dressed as lessons, as a false lesson is recognisable as one; so the letter is dated and placed, since the reader will want to know how old the writer was and how much they could see coming; so length is resisted, given that ten true sentences outlast three earnest pages; and so the letter ends by saying the thing that is hardest to say, rather than saving it for a line that never quite arrives. Letters written this way are read many times, not once.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including your circumstances, your family and anything you are working out on the page. We are editors rather than counsellors, chaplains or estate planners, and we offer no view on your family, your choices or what should be included. What we can do is help this sound like you, saying the thing you actually mean.