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Article: ETHICAL WILLS
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- July 18, 2002
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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Ethical wills are not officially recorded, so no one can say for
sure how widely used they are. In Minneapolis, hospice administrator
Barry K. Baines said that when he first began discussing ethical
wills with patients about five years ago, they looked at him blankly.
He recalled explaining the idea to one indigent patient who worried
that after he died, "there would be no trace of him left on this
Earth."
Baines, who had stumbled across the idea in a library book, told
him: "There's this thousands-of-years-old tradition -- people can
bequeath their values. Everyone has hopes and dreams. You don't have
to be educated or successful."
The patient, a man in his late forties, had a family he ...