There is a saying in some parts of the world that a person doesn’t truly die until the last time their name is spoken. This beautiful idea is an illustration of how much we cherish the memory of people who have gone on before us.
One of the ways a doula can serve their clients is by helping them create legacy projects to honor and remember their loved ones. These can take many forms—art projects, scrapbooks, family trees, audio or video archives—there are endless possibilities, depending on the tastes and abilities of the people involved. An especially popular form of legacy project is to make a memory book, filled with stories by or about the deceased that the family can revisit to keep their memory fresh.
Recently, IDLM has formed a new partnership with a company that helps to create these legacy books. This service is called LifeBooks, and it offers assistance in compiling and creating books designed to help people remember their loved ones. Making a LifeBook might mean gathering stories and other materials from friends and family after someone has died, or it might mean working with someone approaching the end of their life to help them create a book of their own, full of the memories and wisdom they wish to leave behind.
We are so excited to teaming up with LifeBooks and to make it a resource for IDLM doulas and their clients, and we hope it is an option you will take time to explore. To help you out, we are already planning to host a Continuing Education Night on August 5 with Matt Jacobson, founder of LifeBooks, and Aurora Nibley (full disclosure, that is me), who will be working with the next cohort of doula training students as a writing coach to help them construct LifeBooks of their own. We will use this time to explain how the LifeBooks process works and answer your questions about the different ways you can incorporate LifeBooks into your doula practice.
So much of the work we do is focused on helping our clients through the difficult transition of losing a loved one. Legacy projects are a big part of that, and memorial books like the ones LifeBooks helps people put together can preserve treasured memories in a way that very few other types of projects are able to do. We think this partnership will create some wonderful and unique opportunities for the IDLM community, and if you are reading this, we hope you will find ways for LifeBooks to be valuable to you personally.
