“Tell me the facts and I will learn. Tell me the truth and I will believe. But me a story and and it will live in my heart forever.”

People love stories, they alway have and they alway will. Before the written word, people told stories for hundreds of thousand of years. We gathered around campfires and told stories over and over again and they were passed from generation to generation. Facts weren’t told at campfires. Statistics weren’t told at campfires. Stories were told. Stories stick more in the heart than the mind.

You will want to tell as many stories as you can in your letter. The stories are going to touch the heart more than anything else. They are the best way to teach a lesson. 

You can write in your letter that they need to let go of the past and forgive before they can move one. But it is much better to tell them a story about it.

There were a very clever tribe of people three thousand years ago that caught monkeys using an ingenious method. The would cut a coconut in half, hollow out the inside, put a delicious small orange in the center and then tie the coconut back together and put a small hole in the top. Then would then hang the coconut in a tree by a string and wait. Monkeys would smell the delicious orange and find there way to the coconut. They would put their hands through the hole and try to pull the orange out. The couldn’t pull their hands out while it wrapped around the orange. The hole was too small. The hunters would wait until the monkey had his hand in the coconut and then they would lower the coconut using the string. Although the monkey could have let go of the orange and simply taken his hand out, he was so focused on the orange that he wouldn’t let go and therefor allowed himself to be captured because of his stubborn refusal to let go of the orange.

By telling a story rather than preaching good advice a person is much more likely to remember the lesson because all people are wired to remember stories much easier than facts.

“Be careful what you put on paper. It can last forever.”

When you write your “Letter to Your Grandchildren” you want to maintain one of your most precious gifts – your relationship with family. You never want to jeopardize your relationship with your parents, sibling, children or grandchildren. Never include something that will make someone mad, even if it is the truth. Not worth it.

Your letter should be about helping people, not hurting people. You should write it thinking every member of my family will read it. A clean conscience is worth more than gold or diamonds.

There is a place for venting and calling people out, but it is not in your letter to your grandchildren. If there is something very important to you that you feel has to be told, but would throw a family member under a bus, find an indirect way to do it. One way is to tell a story about what happened to a friend of yours or that you read about something in a book and felt that the lesson in the story was so important to you that you need to share it your grandchildren. Another way would be to change all the names and details so that no one is being mentioned directly. However you must make sure you that no one would ever know who the story was about.

“When in doubt, leave it out.”

There are many advantages to starting to write your letter early in your life.

The first is can write about things as they happen or shortly after they happen. This will make your writing much more accurate and detailed. If you start when you are 20 years old, you can very clearly remember your childhood. If you start writing about your childhood when you are 75 years old, your memory will much less clear and may even be inaccurate.

When you start writing your life story early, you will actually begin to see what happens to you with a greater sense of time. You will recognize the truly important moments in your life as they are happening and experience them in greater detail because you thinking about how you are going to write them down.

And finally there is the very real possibility of memory loss due to age or dementia. The older you are when you start writing the less you are going to be able to remember. I knew one woman who’s life story would have been very inspiring and helpful to her family to read, but she started when she was too old and was unable to write enough or remember enough. Her story was lost. She passed away. Her story and her amazing life that was filled full of so many stories that I knew about were never written down and lost. I know there were dozens of stories and lessons learned that I never knew about that could have been shared and passed down to future generations.

Start early. Start today.

What to Include

This is the fun part! There are so many interesting ideas for subjects to include in your letter to your grandchildren. It is all up to you. You get to decide and these decisions are like picking out what ice cream to try in case full of wonderful choices. Here is list that may just may be the tip of your imagination.

A chronological history of your life

The funny stories you just have to share

The sad stories that really touch hearts

Character sketches of your parents and siblings

Dating

How you met your spouse and fell in love

How you kept love alive

Your top ten lessons on a happy marriage

Your top ten lessons on failed relationships

Your working career

Work milestones

Challenges in a working life

Favorite books 

Favorite songs, singers and concerts

The really hard lessons

Favorite movies

Your spiritual life

Your health and fitness journey

School

Christmas

Vacations

Great accomplishments

Challenges you overcame and those you didn’t

Fatherhood

Motherhood

The joys of grand-parenting

The struggles of family

Hobbies

Passions

Why you made important decisions

Any lesson that might help you grandchild in their life

Did you find your talents?

A list of lessons learned

Favorite quotes

The Why

There are four reasons why you should write a letter to your grandchildren about your life. First is to help people you love. Second is the writing of it is in itself a clear demonstration of love. Third is that humankind only advances on the shoulders of a previous that wrote down what they learned. Fourth is an added bonus of helping yourself by providing meaning to your own life.

When you take the time and do the work of writing your life story you help people that you love. You give them a great gift. You give them the story and the wisdom of your life. They will learn from you and apply it to their own life. They will be a better person because they didn’t have to make all the mistakes themselves, they can avoid some of those mistakes because they learned the lessons of your life’s story. They will be inspired by your successes. Reading about how you made it through tough times will help them get through tough times.

The very fact that you took the time and did the work to write a life story letter is in itself a very clear expression of love. They will receive a gift that proves they are worthy of love. This letter means that someone really cares about them. It means that they are special. They are part of a family that cares and love each other.

“Good, better, best. Never let it rest until good is better and better is best.”

If you took away the ability for one generation to pass on its learnings to the next generation then every generation would have to start over from scratch. They would need to learn again from the beginning about algebra, physics, biology, medicine, and every other science. Take away books and we would have to learn the hard way the lessons taught by Shakespeare, Homer, Dickens, Milton, Voltaire, Blake, Austin and so many others. Humankind progresses by standing on the shoulders of previous generations. Only because previous generations wrote things down do we have cars, refrigerators, smart phones and satellites.

When you write down your life story, you allow your grandchildren to stand on your shoulders. You teach them very valuable lessons about life. When you don’t write anything down and don’t pass on your learnings, they have to start from scratch.

There is an added bonus to helping future generations – you are also helping yourself. You do that by making sense of your own life. In writing down your life story, you put structure to it. You provide themes. You make sense of things.

Even if you were to write that your life was crazy, difficult, hard and didn’t seem to make any sense to you – that is your story. Your great, great, great grandchildren can learn from that.

The very act of writing down your life story is a revealing experience that helps you see your life from a higher perspective.