Is there someone or something in your life that has great meaning to you? Raise your hand. Excellent. That's what I thought. Remember, anything that has special significance（意义） in your life is worth sharing. My friend Bill called me a year ago last April.

  He called because he was so excited about writing his life letter. Bill is a physician（医生） with no children. He was finally getting the chance to share some of the family history and the life experiences that quite frankly（坦率地）, he'd been running from most of his life. The very next day after Bill called me, he got into a freak（怪诞的思想、行动或事件） accident playing pickleball and he broke his neck. I went to go visit Bill in the neurosurgical intensive（加强的） care unit a couple days later to help him finish what he had set out to do to write his life letter. Two days later, it was a Thursday night, Bill called me.

  He left me a voicemail and he said, Nancy, I'm having surgery（外科） tomorrow morning. I don't know whether I'm going to make（使） it through the surgery（外科） or not, but I just want to say thank you because I said it all. Well, Bill made it through the surgery. He lost use of all of his limbs（肢） with the injury and he spent many months at Craig Hospital doing intense（强烈的） rehabilitation（复原）. This is where this picture was taken. Fortunately, Bill has shown some improvement but he's got a long and a tough（坚韧的） road ahead of him.

  Life is so fragile（易碎的）. It is so, so fragile. And I know how fragile life is because this is my story too. My first husband, Brett, died of a brain tumor（瘤） when our twins, Rebecca and Casey, were just two and a half years old. This is among the last pictures we ever took as a family at Calvary Hospice（收容所） in Bronx, New York. Brett died just a couple weeks later.

  This was a terrible time in my life, as you might imagine. And when at last Brett died, I have to say that his death was both anguishing and also merciful. After a few tough years of soul（ 灵魂） searching and mourning, I decided to leave my New York City life and head west to Denver, Colorado, to start again. If anybody had ever suggested to Brett or to me that he write a life letter so that someday our children would have a sense of who he was and what really mattered most to him, those words would have carried the kids through so many years, those words would have been such an enduring（忍耐） gift. The most enduring（ 持久的） gift imaginable, those words would have been like gold. This is a picture of my twins pretty recently and they're now 22 years old.

  So what's a life letter? A life letter is a written expression of what matters most, that can be shared with loved ones today and over time as well as one's community. Your family history, your precious（珍贵的） memories, your values that are most important to you and your wishes. The life letter is inspired（激发） by the ancient practice of ethical（伦理的） wills and legacy（遗赠(物)） letters. This is a 3,500 year old tradition that began with fathers passing on wisdom（ 智慧） to their sons to carry into the next generation. In the Middle Ages, this became a written form and there are many powerful examples of ethical wills and legacy letters written over the centuries.

  The life letter can be two pages, it can be 10 pages, it can even be a little bit more. It can be handwritten, it can be typed, it can be spoken. It is not however meant to be your entire（全部的） life story. It's not your autobiography（自传）. It is a much more distilled reflection（反射） of what really matters most to you. It can also be used as a way to clarify（澄清） legal estate（状态） documents.

  Think of the will or a trust（信任） as everything you want your loved ones to have. Whereas（然而） a life letter is about everything you want them to know. And there's another difference too, a will is shared after a death. Ideally（理想地）, the life letter should be shared during one's lifetime（一生）. So many of us wish we knew more about the people who came before us, just like my children. When you share your treasured stories, your wishes for the future, your history, you're making it possible so that someday a grandchild or a great grandchild or someone from your community, your church, your synagogue, your mosque（清真寺）, your bird watching group has answers to questions about your life.