The Gift: Sharing Your Life Lessons with the People You Love Most

The Gift: Sharing Your Life Lessons with the People You Love Most and The Gift Companion Workbook are tools for creating a legacy statement. A legacy statement distills the essential truths and messages by which we wish to be remembered.

This unique two-part publication: a book and companion workbook, makes legacy-writing easy and enjoyable. The workbook makes it easy for a friend or family member to work with the author, writing down the stories and memories as they are recalled.

Our lives will be defined by what we leave behind.

What is a legacy statement? It is the opportunity to share the most personal gift of all: ethical and moral values, wisdom, success and failures, forgiveness, gratitude, opinions and insights based on personal experience and/or lessons from elders.

The Gift: Sharing Your Life Lessons with the People You Love Most contains 24 engaging exercises to guide readers through the steps of creating a legacy statement; easy lessons help recall and relate life experiences, moral and ethical values, personal recollections, and family stories. Writing exercises help facilitate the composition of engaging narratives that inform, illustrate and leave a lasting imprint.

The Gift Companion Workbook provides ample space for recording answers to questions, or for lengthier sharing and storytelling; pages are lined and unlined to allow for illustrations or other images. The workbook can serve as a rough copy for a future manuscript, but is attractive enough to be passed on as the finished product. Instructions for self-publishing help readers create their own books as treasured heirlooms for future generations.

The ease with which answers to questions, stories and reflections can be recorded on behalf of others makes The Gift Companion Workbook an outstanding resource for caregivers, both family and friends of subject storytellers, and professionals. The process of helping someone create a legacy statement provides a unique opportunity for building and healing relationships. Most importantly, it is a warm, engaging way to give assurance that the lessons of a lifetime will be preserved and treasured.

Packaged and priced as a 2-book set with vinyl envelope. Softcover book: 80 pages including blank pages for notes PLUS Softcover Workbook: 96 pages including blank lined and unlined pages for notes and illustrations

“Every once in a while a creative mind comes up with an idea that is elegant in its simplicity — like the themes in the second movement of Mozart’s piano concertos. Elegant, simple, yet powerful. Christine Cowley has presented us with such a gift. . .this little book packs a potent punch for all those would-be chroniclers of their own or their nearest kinfolk’s life stories.”

- Tom Harpur

"Every town and city has a history reflected in the bricks and buildings. Your book shows that the people are the mortar that holds the spirit of the town together... it will have a place of honour at my house, on the coffee table."

- Dave Saunders

"The history of a place resides with its people. Heritage—both family and community—is a treasure beyond price. We seek out our roots to find a sense of belonging and discover that we, too, occupy a place in history."

- Charlie Garrad, Toronto