Merle Saferstein: Painting Life’s Story Through Legacy Journaling

Hello and welcome to In the Rising a health and wellness podcast for those going through and those supporting those going through cancer. My name is Bettina Brown and I'm board certified in physical therapy, wound care and lymphedema, and you know, for me, cancer is very personal. It's affected my friends, my immediate and my not so immediate family, and therefore I created this podcast and fit after breast cancercom to address the multiple dimensions of our lives during and after recovery. Hello, I am really happy that you're here today to talk about something that is very personal and really important, and that's the topic of legacy journaling. My guest today is Merle Saferstein, who has worked with those going through a hospice transition, who have gone through cancer going through cancer and has really been with people in their most vulnerable and difficult times of their life, and I really am excited to share our short, brief conversation about the importance of leaving your legacy and how you can connect with that today. Sometimes I get spoken to as well, and I kept hearing the statement that I heard and impacted me several years ago to who much is given, much is expected, and if that's true, I have a lot expected of me, and so I decided to just give out a gift today as well. In the last episode I gave out a free gift and today I have one as well, and listen to the end to hear what I would like to share with you. Thank you so much, merle, for being here on In the Rising podcast. It's really a privilege and I've been excited about our conversation.

Thank, you, and I'm looking forward to it myself. I'm glad to be here.

Really living and leaving my legacy. I think legacy talk is something that gives us more purpose and makes us feel like the good times and the bad times have some value with that, and we have been leaving stories for our children and telling stories to our friends and children and family for a very long time, and then they leave their story for the next generation, but at some point the stories get confused, the stories get forgotten, and so I would like you to just share how legacy journaling has come about for you.

I'd be happy to. I've been keeping journals since 1974 and I have two children, and at some point I realized that I really can't leave my journals to my children, that I've written them for my eyes only, and so in the year 2000, I started really examining what I'm going to do with them and realized that, as an educator, I always hoped that there was something in there that was worth passing along. But I wasn't sure, and at the time, in 2000, I had about 240 journals, and so I embarked on this journey of going through my journals and seeing if, in fact, there was something that was worth passing along to my children, and that process it ended up to be 359 journals. They date from 1974 to 2016. And basically the difference between journaling and legacy journaling is journaling I wrote for myself. Legacy journaling is something that we pass along to granddaughters when they were born, and the day they were born I started writing journals to each of them, and so that is for sure a legacy journal, and what I've done with my journals is I've taken out those excerpts to pass along, and so I've considered it a legacy journal, because it is the messages, the life lessons, the values and the beliefs that I really want my children, my family and beyond to understand and know.

And that's really important. And what I liked about your phrase here is that I felt like I was time traveling reading back through that. We could have hours of conversation about this topic, but what do you feel was one thing that you came away with just going through the process of organizing your journals to leave a legacy?

journal. One thing that was really surprising to me was I feel that I'm a very positive person, and if someone had said to me prior to this how much of your life is positive and how much is negative, I would have just definitely said 91% positive, 9% negative. And what I came to realize is that it was because I wrote some of these difficult moments in my life down, that I worked through them in writing and came out with positive feelings and was able to move beyond the negative to the positive, and so that was a real big surprise to me. I did not expect that at all, and so I would say that was probably one of the biggest things. One of the greatest gifts I gave myself was being able to go back in time and, for example, if I had an idea and I wrote it down and then watched how, through the years, it grew into something that was fascinating for me as well. And then you mentioned time travel. There were days that I was reading an old journal, I was typing in excerpts from a journal I had read, so that's another time zone, and then, or a year difference, and then I was in the present. So there were days that I was in three different worlds, which was really an incredible experience.

And I think it's almost nice to look at your life objectively. Right, we have our memories, but when we're reading through we're kind of feeling that again, how much we have forgotten or worked through that we didn't realize, and how many lessons we see we've gained and learned and how many lessons people will be able to gain and learn by reading what we have gone through.

Right. One of the things that surprised me was how early on I wrote about some of the things that I thought that I learned much later in life, but in fact they were really part of my life early on, and so that was a huge surprise to me. I didn't realize that. So life lessons I mean, that's really the legacy class I teach. That's what it's all about. What have we learned and what do we want to pass along. So life lessons makes a big difference in passing along one's legacy.

And now you have also worked with a lot of people who have gone through major things in life, from a person like everything's a personal story, but a personal story of cancer, to a personal story that was in conjunction with a lot of other people's personal stories, such as those that survived the Holocaust. What do you feel people are looking to leave behind when they've gone through things like that?

Well, one of the things I've done with people who are dying, people at the end of their life, is work on some kind of legacy project with them, and basically I've given them the opportunity to do several things. One could be an interview where you just talk about your life, a scrapbook, a videotape, just all kinds of different things. One of the things that most people choose to do is to write an ethical will. So an ethical will is a spiritual document and basically it contains one's life lessons, values and beliefs and hopes and dreams. And so I have worked with less people literally on their deathbed writing this. And so what happens is they? They're looking at their life, they're understanding that, they want to know that they matter, that people are going to remember them, that people maybe have learned something from them or that they've touched a life. What I do is I have them lots of questions, tell me stories. With each story I ask them what did they learn from that story? Then we write that down. That becomes part of an ethical will. It is something that one of the women told me after she did that. We worked together intensely for three days and she was really on her deathbed. She said to me. I feel like I can die now. I feel like I've done the work. It serves two purposes. It helps the person go through his or her life and look at the things that matter. It also helps them to understand that they're passing that along to others. I think that's important as well.

I think it is really important for many of us to feel like our life mattered. I think we still look for that justification and validation in so many ways, whether it's through social media or people are paying attention to me. We just want to feel seen and heard. It goes right back down to that. What lesson do you feel that you've come away with? Having the perspective and the I guess honor to work with people so close to the end of their life? What would be one big lesson that you've come away that's a really good question With the Holocaust survivors.

This was not the end of their life, but from them I learned the resilience of the human spirit, which really has made a big difference in my life. I understand that people can go through some of the most difficult moments and pick up the pieces. How I translate that when working with people who are and dying is to help them to understand what matters in their life and to look at their life as just to be able to reflect on it and to know that they've made a difference in this world in some way. I think that that's probably the biggest takeaway for me. I also just so admire people who are willing to do the work and to understand the importance of doing some kind of legacy work, especially those who are at the end of their life, who are sick and yet are willing to do this because they know that they want to live on in some way. Basically, through all of this, I do say that how we live our life becomes our legacy. Even if someone were not to actually do some kind of legacy project, the truth is that we learn from people by example. It's not necessarily what someone says, but it's what they do. Basically, I think what's so important is to be able to talk to patients and to learn who they were, instead of just treating their illness, but to let them talk about their lives and share, because each one of us has stories. I always look for that.

I really appreciated my conversation with Merle today because she's been there. She's been there with so many people sharing their stories at the very end and wanting to leave that for their family, for their friends, so that people really know what they were feeling and believing the things that we tend to push down so often. I realized I have a legacy journal as well, in the shape of this podcast. This is episode 198. I've been doing this for four years. That's my legacy to leave behind conversations and really wonderful revelations, like I did with Merle today. Thank you so much for your time. I hope that you feel inspired to leave a little bit of legacy behind, in a spoken word or in a written word, in the form of a journal. Also, remember that the way you live your life is the biggest statement and the biggest legacy you have. Enjoy your life and enjoy what you have to give. I did say that I had a gift as well. That is my course on Udemy Recovery to Function a guide to rehab after breast cancer. This is all about information on scar tissue rehabilitation, mobility, emotional stability and how to emotionally go through your own journey. You can even gift this to someone else. I'm really excited and that is in the link below. I am so thankful for your time, because that's something we do not get back, and until next time, let's keep building one another up.