While We Are Still Here — Legacy Workbook & Guide
The stories you’ll want someday are here now.
While We Are Still Here is a 139-page digital guide and interactive workbook designed to help you create meaningful legacy projects with the people you love — while there is still time to ask the questions, hear the stories, and simply be together.
Created by end-of-life doula Ash Embla, this guide grew from years spent close to illness, dying, grief, memory, and the families navigating these experiences. It is rooted in a simple belief: legacy does not have to be grand.
Sometimes legacy is a handwritten recipe. A recording of your grandfather telling a story. Your mother's handwriting. A photograph of your father's hands. A letter for a future grandchild. A family tradition. A story about childhood you've never heard before.
Sometimes it begins with sitting beside someone you love and saying:
“Tell me about your life.”
WHAT THIS GUIDE IS ABOUT
This isn't a book about preparing someone to die.
It's about becoming more awake to the person who is still here.
The guide explores presence, anticipatory grief, changing memory, family stories, meaningful conversations, and the ordinary details of a life that can become extraordinarily important after someone is gone.
You'll be guided through questions, reflections and legacy projects that can help you preserve stories, memories, traditions, recipes, photographs, handwriting, recordings, wisdom and pieces of family history.
But there is no pressure to capture everything.
One of the central ideas of the guide is that presence comes before preservation. Before recording someone's voice, listen to it. Before photographing their hands, hold them. Before trying to archive a life, spend time with the person living it.
WHO IS THIS FOR?
This guide was created for families and loved ones navigating aging, dementia, serious or terminal illness, as well as anyone who simply wants to know and preserve more of someone's story while they still have the opportunity.
It may be especially meaningful for adult children and their parents, grandchildren and grandparents, partners, caregivers, and anyone who has ever thought:
“I wish I had asked more questions.”
INSIDE YOU'LL EXPLORE
- Meaningful questions that invite storytelling rather than interrogation
- Childhood, family history and life experiences
- Memories, photographs and personal objects
- Recipes, traditions, skills and everyday rituals
- Voice recordings, handwriting and letters
- Legacy projects you can create together
- Navigating memory changes and dementia with greater tenderness
- Presence and connection during serious illness
- Anticipatory grief and the awareness of limited time
- What we inherit beyond physical belongings
- What cannot be preserved
- Continuing someone's legacy after they are gone
- Dedicated reflection and writing spaces throughout the workbook
The questions aren't meant to create a perfectly documented biography. They are invitations into someone's life — including the little details that make a person who they are.
YOU WILL RECEIVE
2 digital PDF files:
Printable PDF — 139 pages
Designed for printing and writing by hand.
Fillable PDF — 139 pages
Includes digital writing fields so you can type your reflections and responses directly into the workbook.
This is an instant DIGITAL DOWNLOAD. No physical book will be shipped.
A DIFFERENT WAY TO THINK ABOUT LEGACY
Legacy isn't only what someone leaves behind when they die.
It is already being created around kitchen tables, through stories told for the hundredth time, recipes passed between generations, songs remembered, skills taught, photographs revisited, ordinary afternoons spent together, and the ways another person's life has shaped our own.
You don't need to complete every page.
You don't need to ask every question.
You don't need to turn someone's remaining life into a project.
Perhaps one question is enough.
Perhaps one afternoon is enough.
Perhaps simply paying attention is where legacy begins.
While We Are Still Here — Legacy Workbook & Guide
The stories you’ll want someday are here now.
While We Are Still Here is a 139-page digital guide and interactive workbook designed to help you create meaningful legacy projects with the people you love — while there is still time to ask the questions, hear the stories, and simply be together.
Created by end-of-life doula Ash Embla, this guide grew from years spent close to illness, dying, grief, memory, and the families navigating these experiences. It is rooted in a simple belief: legacy does not have to be grand.
Sometimes legacy is a handwritten recipe. A recording of your grandfather telling a story. Your mother's handwriting. A photograph of your father's hands. A letter for a future grandchild. A family tradition. A story about childhood you've never heard before.
Sometimes it begins with sitting beside someone you love and saying:
“Tell me about your life.”
WHAT THIS GUIDE IS ABOUT
This isn't a book about preparing someone to die.
It's about becoming more awake to the person who is still here.
The guide explores presence, anticipatory grief, changing memory, family stories, meaningful conversations, and the ordinary details of a life that can become extraordinarily important after someone is gone.
You'll be guided through questions, reflections and legacy projects that can help you preserve stories, memories, traditions, recipes, photographs, handwriting, recordings, wisdom and pieces of family history.
But there is no pressure to capture everything.
One of the central ideas of the guide is that presence comes before preservation. Before recording someone's voice, listen to it. Before photographing their hands, hold them. Before trying to archive a life, spend time with the person living it.
WHO IS THIS FOR?
This guide was created for families and loved ones navigating aging, dementia, serious or terminal illness, as well as anyone who simply wants to know and preserve more of someone's story while they still have the opportunity.
It may be especially meaningful for adult children and their parents, grandchildren and grandparents, partners, caregivers, and anyone who has ever thought:
“I wish I had asked more questions.”
INSIDE YOU'LL EXPLORE
- Meaningful questions that invite storytelling rather than interrogation
- Childhood, family history and life experiences
- Memories, photographs and personal objects
- Recipes, traditions, skills and everyday rituals
- Voice recordings, handwriting and letters
- Legacy projects you can create together
- Navigating memory changes and dementia with greater tenderness
- Presence and connection during serious illness
- Anticipatory grief and the awareness of limited time
- What we inherit beyond physical belongings
- What cannot be preserved
- Continuing someone's legacy after they are gone
- Dedicated reflection and writing spaces throughout the workbook
The questions aren't meant to create a perfectly documented biography. They are invitations into someone's life — including the little details that make a person who they are.
YOU WILL RECEIVE
2 digital PDF files:
Printable PDF — 139 pages
Designed for printing and writing by hand.
Fillable PDF — 139 pages
Includes digital writing fields so you can type your reflections and responses directly into the workbook.
This is an instant DIGITAL DOWNLOAD. No physical book will be shipped.
A DIFFERENT WAY TO THINK ABOUT LEGACY
Legacy isn't only what someone leaves behind when they die.
It is already being created around kitchen tables, through stories told for the hundredth time, recipes passed between generations, songs remembered, skills taught, photographs revisited, ordinary afternoons spent together, and the ways another person's life has shaped our own.
You don't need to complete every page.
You don't need to ask every question.
You don't need to turn someone's remaining life into a project.
Perhaps one question is enough.
Perhaps one afternoon is enough.
Perhaps simply paying attention is where legacy begins.
