What is an Ethical Will?

Before funerals at funeral homes in Burtonsville, MD, more and more people are choosing to leave ethical wills to their surviving family members. As people start to contemplate their own mortality, they also start thinking about what they want to leave behind for their families, including their children and grandchildren.

Perhaps they get their medical, financial, legal, and digital affairs squared away so that there are no ambiguities and everything runs as smoothly as it possibly can when someone is facing the end of life, and then dies. That is a tremendous gift to leave family members, because it takes care of the practical parts of the end of life and dying..

However, there are other things that are very important to pass on to future generations. One of these is our moral code – the principles we believe in and practice, to the best of our ability, in our lives.

All the stuff we leave behind will eventually be gone, either because it breaks, it gets old, or it gets depleted. Things are finite and always come to an end. But our moral code, also known as our ethical legacy, is an intangible gift that we can give to our families that is unbreakable, timeless, and is in abundant supply. It may be the most valuable thing that we leave to our families after we die.

We all know of people who lived by an ethical code, but who failed to pass it on to their families, so it died with them. We also see the results of not having an ethical will in successive generations, as scandals, disasters, and even total ruin because they didn’t have an ethical legacy that they were accountable to and responsible for continuing and passing on to future generations.

These examples are a good reason to think about writing an ethical will. While this isn’t a legal document, it how you’ve tried to live and how you would like your family to live after you die. It’s your personal code, which involves relationships and ethics. If you’d liked to see a good example of an ethical will, consider reading the book of Proverbs in the Bible.

So what’s in an ethical will? The framework involves a mission statement that explains the code we’ve tried to follow in living our lives. Included within that are the lessons we’ve learned from our relationships, our experiences, our successes, and our failures. Life is full of lessons. Those can provide us with a perspective on our lives, while they can give guidance to our families that we leave behind when we die.

An ethical will should state what we deem to be the most valuable and important in life. It states what we stand for and what we will not turn from nor compromise on. These are our core values, which we want continued to be followed after our deaths.

Although the term ethical will is new, people have been doing this for a very long time. It may have taken the form of a letter written just before someone died or it may have been a series of conversations in the months, weeks, or days before dying. While not everyone has always done it, many people saw this as the last gift to their families and they made it happen.

If you’d like to know more about ethical wills at funeral homes in Burtonsville, MD, you can talk with our knowledgeable team at Donald V. Borgwardt Funeral Home, P.A. You can visit our funeral home at 4400 Powder Mill Rd., Beltsville, MD, 20705, or you can call us today at (301) 937-1707.