Legacy Work
Improving clients' quality of life through storytelling
I am thrilled to offer all of my doula clients an account with Haven, an easy-to-use, complete tool that helps them build, tell, and preserve their cherished and important life stories — in their own words, using their favorite photos, all housed under one roof built in love.
The power of story
My service as a practicing death doula is enhanced by my “previous life” as a communications expert — decades of academic, professional, and personal experience in storytelling. The most meaningful takeaway from all of that work is this:
Story is the quintessential human experience. We are storytelling creatures, and as such we are so much more powerful than we realize to create, shape, and change our lives for the better.
During this “previous life,” I also earned a master's degree in communication, specializing in health communication. My thesis was a narrative analysis of blogs that cancer patients wrote about their diagnosis appointments. The research I conducted revealed the critical importance — healing, really — that story coherence plays in the illness journey, and I called for “story therapy” to be integrated into the cancer-patient experience for improved outcomes (physical, emotional, and spiritual).
So imagine my delight at discovering Haven, an evidence-based, easy-to-use platform that combines clinical research with technology to help my client’s capture, build, and preserve their legacies through storytelling.
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I am proud to offer Haven to all of my doula clients. It's a beautiful, easy-to-use, and infinitely useful tool that I witness improving my clients' quality of life — and the overall dying and death experience for both clients and their circles of loved ones.
Haven is the first customer-centric company built from clinical research to help the person, family, and the organizations that serve them improve quality of life during life’s last chapter. In this way we are changing the feared experience of death, a very natural part of life, into something more meaningful and peaceful.
— Maggie Gannon, advance practice nurse and founder of Haven
Why Haven?
Legacy work is healing work.
Life-story work (also called legacy work and including dignity therapy) is proven and respected for meeting humans’ emotional, spiritual, and social needs. It’s even been proven to decrease symptoms of pain, major depression, and anxiety — often common at the end of life.
Legacy work, especially when done with professional guidance and support, enhances the wellbeing of the whole person no matter what stage of life they’re navigating.
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It’s simple.
Haven is easy to use. I work with you (alone or with loved ones) to build your legacy, or I can train you in mere minutes to build your own. No matter what, there will always be support available!
The most basic information is all you need to get started. You can come back and build and edit your content at any time. You maintain full control of your content throughout the process, including who has access to your story after your death.
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It’s complete.
The platform enables you to build a full-spectrum digital legacy that includes your life story, letters to loved ones, photos, and more — all of which lives under the one roof of Haven. Everything you add is preserved here, keeping your story alive and uniting loved ones who share and engage with it as you build it and after your passing.