One Family’s Bequest to TRU Community Care:
A Legacy Gift
By Dick Livingston
My wife Linda’s parents moved from Florida to the Academy in Boulder after both had reached an age where they needed more care. After two years or so, as Linda’s father began to lose ground rapidly, TRU Hospice stepped in and was extremely helpful at many levels in making his end-of-life as comfortable as possible. This was over a period of about a month.
Linda’s mother’s experience with TRU Hospice was much longer. She required home care at the Academy for about a year and then was in the TRU Hospice Care Center in Louisville for a few days. There she rallied to the point that she was able to move to the regular nursing care section of Balfour with TRU’s help. She lived there for another three months or so. Her last words to us were I’m ready. Her TRU Hospice experience during the last six months of her life had so very much to do with that sense of peace, and also with the family’s sense of peace. We knew that all that could be done and should be done, was done – and done very well.
Our respect and gratitude for TRU Hospice is boundless. In fact, the exceptional personal experiences we and our family have with the organization – coupled with our knowledge of how very effectively TRU Community Care uses their donated funds – has led Linda and me to make a bequest for TRU Community Care. We have arranged this by including TRU as a beneficiary of my retirement IRA.
We are telling our story here in the hope that it will offer some food for thought for others who might wish to share their estate assets with TRU Community Care and other nonprofits whose work they admire. We have found that the bequest technique offers a number of advantages for us – and for nonprofits in general. The principal benefit for donors is that the bequest is revocable. Thus, if our circumstances change, we can still access these funds. In addition, the bequest is easy to understand, simple and economical to set up, and quite straight forward to change if necessary. We’ve found it to be among the best ways to give a legacy gift to a nonprofit.