what story are you leaving behind?
Eighteen months ago, when I launched my business as a Leadership and Legacy Coach, I got a lot of questions about what 'legacy' actually means. Today, everyone seems to be talking about it, but I wonder how many people truly understand what they're building.
Legacy isn't just about the money you leave behind or the monuments bearing your name. For me, legacy is the situation we create after we die as a result of our past actions and decisions (thank you, Cambridge dictionary!). It's the ripple effect of how we lived, loved, and chose to spend our days. It encompasses our values in action, the relationships we nurtured, and the problems we solved. What people seldom think about, though, is that it will also include how we have prepared our families to carry on without us once we are gone.
This is exactly why I believe the majority of people reading this would leave their families completely unprepared if they died today.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Preparedness
Data from Angus Reid in 2023 indicated that only fifty percent of Canadians have a will. That number drops for younger Canadians, with four-in-five younger than 35 saying they do not have a will. Even if you do have a will, one-in-eight (13%) said theirs is out of date.
But here's what most people don't realize: a will is just the starting point.
True preparedness—the kind that honours your legacy while protecting your loved ones—requires comprehensive end-of-life planning. This goes far beyond traditional estate planning and includes:
Advance Care Planning: Your choices around care in your final stages of life. Do you want aggressive medical intervention? What does comfort care look like to you? Who should make these decisions if you can't?
Digital and Financial Organization: Templates to record all your accounts—banking, investment, home-related, social media—complete with passwords and detailed instructions for family members. In our digital age, this information is often scattered, fragmented, and inaccessible when families need it most.
Final Arrangements: Discussions about your funeral, what happens to your body (there are many more options than cremation and burial these days), and how to communicate these wishes to loved ones before the emotional weight of loss makes decision-making nearly impossible.
Legacy Reflection: Perhaps most importantly, examining the legacy you're currently building and ensuring it aligns with how you want to be remembered. These are intentional actions—things you can start doing now that can have a huge impact.
So Why Do We Avoid These Conversations?
We live in a very death-averse society. We will go to great lengths to avoid even saying the word 'death'. Instead, we use euphemisms like 'passed on', or 'loss', or 'gone to a better place' as if terminology will somehow make dying seem more palatable.
Yet one of the single greatest realities for every single one of us is that we will all die. How we choose to prepare for it and live our life leading up to the end, however that may come is what differentiates us.
We avoid conversations about death and preparedness because they are hard. They require courage and vulnerability. They require you to be willing to imagine the end of your life and what will happen after you die.
I understand the resistance.
I think I have become comfortable with death because I have experienced the death of many people I have loved, grandparents, aunts, uncles, close friends. I have faced death. Walking away from a car accident that killed my best friend instantly gave me a different perspective on life.
I am not unique. I see it in my clients. Those who have experienced a life-threatening illness or a brush with death are keen to get their affairs in order, as are people in their 70s and 80s. These groups typically embrace these discussions more readily because death feels more real to them.
But people my age—those in their 40s, and I would extend this to people in their 50s—find these conversations harder. We're in the thick of life: demanding careers, growing children, mortgages, and the constant feeling that there aren't enough hours in the day. We're focused on putting food on the table; planning for our death feels like something decades away or perhaps unimaginable altogether.
My Wake-Up Call: When Work Got the Best of Me
There was a time in my life when legacy wasn't something I thought about every day, a time before it influenced my values, shaped how I prioritized my time, and guided who I chose to spend this "one precious life" with.
During the pandemic, I spiralled into burnout. By 2022, I was not well. As my life unraveled, I consciously chose to bury myself in work to avoid dealing with everything else. Work was the one place where I didn't feel like a failure, quite the opposite, actually. I felt like I was thriving. Since work was the only place where I felt good most days, I devoted almost all my energy to maintaining that performance. The only problem was that it left me drained at the end of each day, with nothing left in the tank for my family.
It took me far too long to recognize that work was getting the best version of me. When that realization finally hit, it was devastating. I wasn't showing up as the mother and wife I wanted to be, let alone the daughter, sister, or friend I aspired to be. I knew something had to change.
The reset took time—six months of mental health leave, another year attempting to return to government (only to nearly fall back into burnout before quitting for good), plus eight more months before I felt stable again. Honestly, it's still a work in progress.
My most important action: rebuilding myself. I learned that without focusing on myself, I would never be able to show up as the person that I wanted to be for others—the person that contributes meaningfully to the community, who creates a home that is full of laughter and joy.
Maya Angelou famously said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." This is a quote that I try to embody every day. Knowing that my actions impact the people in my life and influence the mark I'm leaving on the world, I want to make damn sure I'm being intentional about it.
Here's the thing about legacy: it isn't something you create at the end of your life. It's something you build every single day through the choices you make, the energy you bring to your relationships, and the values you demonstrate through your actions.
I want my daughters to remember me as someone who was fun, who loved them unconditionally, and was always there for them. I can't start building that kind of legacy at 65 years old. That is something that is constructed through a lifetime of stories and memories.
Living Your Legacy Now
I want to shift the narrative. End-of-life planning is not morbid, it's one of the most life-affirming things you can do. When you're forced to consider what matters most, what you want to be remembered for, and how you want your loved ones to feel supported after you're gone, you naturally start living more intentionally.
You begin asking different questions:
Who do I really want to be?
How do I want to show up in my relationships?
What kind of parent, partner, friend am I being?
Am I focusing on what matters most?
What would I regret not doing or not saying?
How can I make someone's life better today?
Am I on the most fulfilling path?
If this resonates with you, start small. You don't need to tackle everything at once. Maybe begin with a conversation with your partner about your wishes, or finally create that will you've been putting off. Perhaps it's as simple as telling someone how much they mean to you. The goal isn't to become obsessed with death—it's to become more intentional about life. Because when we plan for the end, we often discover what matters most in the middle.
Your legacy isn't something waiting for you to write it—you have the ability to control the narrative with every single choice you make.
The question is: are you writing the story you want to leave behind?
