How to Live Forever: A Guide to Writing the Final Chapter of Your Life Story

by Kimberly Best, John Trent (Editor)

Overview

Your life is a story, and it's yours to write, all the way through to the end. There are numerous decisions to be made regarding aging, illness, and end-of-life issues, but many people put off those decisions until it's too late. We may be purposeful in planning for our lives, but we often leave the last piece, the final chapter, undefined.

How to Live Forever seeks to lay a foundation for people to live well in the time they have, to leave their stories behind as their legacies, and to write their own best ending so that their final wishes can be honored. Author Kimberly Best encourages you to consider what you want the final chapter of your life to look and feel like, providing you with tools and prompts that can help you have difficult conversations regarding legal decisions, health care plans, relationships, and death and dying. If we recognize the finite nature of our days, we can live purposefully, plan ahead for the end of our life story, and die without regret, living fully to the end and finishing well.

Visit bestconflictsolutions.com for additional tools and worksheets to help you write your last chapter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781973675334
Publisher:	WestBow Press
Publication date:	10/11/2019
Pages:	150
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.35(d)

About the Author

Kimberly Best is a professional conflict mediator focusing on conflict coaching, family mediation, and elder care mediation. She holds a master's degree in conflict management from Lipscomb University. She spent her early career as a registered nurse in intensive care, trauma, and emergency medicine, where she gained valuable experience in the medical system. A mother and grandmother, she currently lives in Franklin, Tennessee, where she runs her mediation practice.

Editorial Reviews

2020-06-01
A debut self-help book offers suggestions for practical and emotional end-of-life planning.

In this manual, Best draws on her experiences working as both a nurse and a mediator as well as on lessons learned from her own relatives’ end-of-life processes to guide readers through establishing wills, making health care plans, and telling their stories to loved ones. In concise chapters, the author explains each topic, provides examples, and presents readers with a step-by-step checklist of items to discuss and consider. While the volume spends some time on concrete legal and financial aspects of end-of-life planning, Best generally takes a holistic view, encouraging readers to make the most of relationships, think about how they wish to be remembered, and figure out what kind of rituals they would like survivors to commemorate them with. The author urges readers to accept the idea of death and position themselves to meet it as productively and positively as possible, giving and receiving forgiveness when necessary in order to end relationships on the best note. Best’s explanations of technical terms are clear and easy to follow (“Supported decision-making recognizes, respects, and protects your right to make choices for as long as you are able”), and the book’s tone is supportive and comforting, an appropriate fit for the subject matter. The anecdotes that appear throughout provide solid examples of the advantages of planning in advance, demonstrating how an estate can languish in probate if its disposition is not arranged ahead of time, and showing how a person who leaves instructions for a positive celebration of life instead of a funeral can leave friends and family with a sense of love and appreciation rather than sadness. The manual’s dictum to “think about our lives as stories” delivers a unique angle on developing an understanding of a full and well-lived life as well as a sense of structure that may be valuable to readers in plotting their own trajectories. Best also recommends several works that the audience may find useful, particularly Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. In addition, the book includes helpful references and a bibliography.

A thoughtful and readable guide to making crucial death arrangements and estate decisions.

Kirkus Reviews