“Hollywood icon Robert Redford dies at age 89”, read an Indianapolis Star headline earlier this month. As both a movie fan and as a member of an Indiana estate planning blog team, I couldn’t help noticing that the article appeared to emphasize two different aspects of Redford’s story: accomplishments and legacy. In other words, Brian Truitts of USA Today was sharing what Robert Redford did and what Robert Redford “stood for”.
Redford had “an uncanny knack for finding the perfect scene partner,” Truitt observes, citing Redford’s co-star Paul Newman in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Sting”, Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were”, Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men”, and Meryl Streep in “Out of Africa”. Then, after winning a best director Academy Award for “Ordinary People”, Redford founded the Sundance Institute to foster the works of others, Truitts emphasizes, thus creating a legacy that would live beyond himself.
Our attorneys at Geyer Law find our clients’ values are woven into the very fabric of each of their estate planning decisions. For many, in planning their estate, they want to pass down not only wealth, but also give expression to their own ethics and beliefs.
Specific religious beliefs can be expressed through funeral and burial arrangements, through one’s choice to be an organ donor, and through including legacy donations to religious organizations in one’s estate plan. One’s values can come into play through advance directives about how near-death care should be handled.
At Geyer Law, needless to say, few of our estate planning and elderlaw clients are as well-known as Robert Redford. And, while the documents we help create may direct how clients’ assets are preserved, managed, and distributed, most will not have a USA Today reporter chronicling their lifelong accomplishments. For that very reason, we encourage creating a “memoir”, telling your story in “your own way” to the next generation.
– by Ronnie of the Geyer Legal Group, PC blog team
