Everyone has a story to tell.  Everyone within a family usually wants to hear that story.

However, it’s not an easy thing to approach someone who is nearing the end and ask them to tell their stories so that the stories can remain even as the person passes away.  This isn’t an easy subject for most people to ponder.  I know that as my grandparents were nearing the end of their years we all wanted to ask them to record for us their life tales.  But what held us back was knowing that if we asked them to do so…would be for us all to acknowledge that the end of their time here was indeed close at hand.

But recently I was asked by some friends to edit a series of video interviews.  Their relative had cancer and knew that they were about to pass away.  Their chemo/radiation had run the course and they were at peace with a natural ending.  The family all sat down together with a video camera running and they all asked this person to tell their favorite stories one more time.  It resulted in an hour long memorial video that I created for them with chapter headings so that they could go straight to their favorite story whenever they wanted to.

Later, I was asked by someone to help teach their father how to acquire and use a camera during his final months with a terminal cancer diagnosis.  I met with him, found a perfect camera and trained him on how to use it.  He spent his final month using that camera a LOT.  In time I’ll edit all that footage into preserved memories for the family.

And most recently someone asked me to interview their father in his retirement home apartment.  I presented their father with favorite old family photos of his and he told the tales, answered follow up questions and before I knew it we had created over 1.5 hours of his tales, humor and even stories reaching back into the generations before he was alive.

So I am finally going official with this valuable service at large and I am calling it “Life Legacy Videos”.  Here is the page on my site about it.