Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief at The Huffington Post Media Group, posted an excellent article on Linked-in today.
While my wife and I bought cemetery plots years ago, we just started talking about the actual funeral service. Rather than writing a eulogy under the pressure of planning for the funeral, we thought that we should sit down and prepare something in advance.
This exercise has me reflecting on how I want to be remembered. Arianna Huffington makes the same point very eloquently.
"Today I want every American to see how these men and women lived," President Obama
said
Sunday, eulogizing the 12 men and women killed in the Washington Navy
Yard shooting. He spoke of volunteers who made time to give back to
their communities, like "Frank Kohler, giving dictionaries to every
third-grader in his county," and "Marty Bodrog, leading the children's
Bible study at church." There were fathers like Mike Ridgell, "coaching
his daughters' softball teams and joining Facebook just to keep up with
his girls, one of whom said he was always the cool dad." There were
mothers like Mary Francis Knight, "devoted to her daughters ... who had
just recently watched with joy as her older daughter got married," and
grandparents like John Johnson, "always smiling, giving bear hugs to his
10 grandchildren ... who would have welcomed his 11th grandchild this
fall."
Have you noticed that when people die, their eulogies
celebrate life very differently from the way we define success in our
everyday existence? Eulogies are, in fact, very Third Metric. At
HuffPost we've made the
Third Metric
-- redefining success beyond money and power to include well-being,
wisdom and our ability to wonder and to give -- a key editorial focus.
But while it's not hard to live a Third Metric life, it's very easy not
to. It's easy to let ourselves get consumed by our work. It's easy to
use work to let ourselves forget the things and the people that truly
sustain us. It's easy to let technology wrap us in a perpetually
harried, stressed-out existence. It's easy, in effect, to miss our lives
even while we're living them. Until we're no longer living them.
For
most of us, our eulogy will be not just the first formal marking down
of what our lives were about but the only one. The eulogy is the
foundational document of our legacy, of how people remember us, of how
we live on in the minds and hearts of others. And it is very telling
what you don't hear in eulogies. You almost never hear things like:
"Of course his crowning achievement was when he made senior vice president."
Or:
"What everybody loved most about her was how she ate lunch at her desk. Every day."
Or:
"He
was proud that he never made it to one of his kid's Little League games
because he always wanted to go over those figures one more time."
Or:
"She didn't have any real friends, but she had 600 Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her inbox every night."
Or:
"But
he will live on, not in our hearts or memories, because we barely knew
him, but in his PowerPoint slides, which were always meticulously
prepared."
No matter how much a person spends his or her life
burning the candle at both ends, chasing a toxic definition of success
and generally missing out on life, the eulogy is always about the other
stuff: what they gave, how they connected, how much they meant to the
lives of the real people around them, small kindnesses, lifelong
passions and what made them laugh.
So the question is: Why do we spend so much time on what our eulogy is not going to be?
"Eulogies aren't résumés," David Brooks
wrote
in June. "They describe the person's care, wisdom, truthfulness and
courage. They describe the million little moral judgments that emanate
from that inner region."
And yet we spend so much time and effort
and energy on those résumé entries, which are gone as soon our heart
stops beating. Even for those who die with amazing résumés, whose lives
were synonymous with accomplishment and achievement, their eulogies are
mostly about what they did when they weren't achieving and succeeding --
at least by our current, broken definition of success.
For example,
look at Steve Jobs, a man whose life, at least as the public saw it, was
about creating things, things that were, yes, amazing and
game-changing, but when his sister, Mona Simpson, rose to memorialize
him at his memorial service at Stanford University,
that's not what she focused on.
Yes,
she talked about his work and his work ethic, but mostly as
manifestations of his passions. "Steve worked at what he loved," she
said. But what really moved him, what he really loved, was love. "Love
was his supreme virtue," she said, "his god of gods." And though yes, he
loved his work, he loved his family too:
When [his son] Reed was
born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with
each of his children. He fretted over Lisa's boyfriends and Erin's
travel and skirt lengths and Eve's safety around the horses she adored.
And
then she added this touching image: "None of us who attended Reed's
graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow
dancing."
And about his wife: "His abiding love for Laurene
sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere.
In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never
pessimistic."
And then there were lines like these, sprinkled throughout:
"Steve was humble."
"Steve liked to keep learning."
"Steve cultivated whimsy."
"With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun."
"He treasured happiness."
"He was an intensely emotional man."
His
sister made sure in her eulogy that we knew that Steve Jobs was a lot
more than just the guy who invented the iPhone. He was a brother and a
husband and a father who knew the true value of what technology can so
easily distract us from. Even if you build an iconic product, even one
that lives on, what will be foremost in the minds of the people you care
about most will be the memories you built in their lives. In her 1951
novel
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar has the Roman emperor
meditating on his death: "[I]t seems to me as I write this hardly important to have been emperor."
And Thomas Jefferson's epitaph
describes him as
"author of the Declaration of American Independence ... and father of
the University of Virginia." No mention of the presidency.
What
the old adage that we should live every day as our last usually means is
that we shouldn't wait until it's our last day on Earth to begin
prioritizing the things that really matter.
Anyone with a few
smartphones and a full email inbox knows that it's easy to live while
not being aware we're living. So a Third Metric life would be one lived
in a way that's mindful of what our eulogy will one day be. "I'm always
relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I'm listening
to it,"
joked
George Carlin. We may not be listening to our own eulogy, but we're
actually writing it all the time, every day. The question is how much
we're giving the eulogizer to work with.
This past summer an obituary of a Seattle woman named Jane Lotter, who died of cancer at 60,
went viral. The author of the obit was Lotter herself.
"One
of the few advantages of dying from Grade 3, Stage IIIC endometrial
cancer, recurrent and metastasized to the liver and abdomen," she
wrote,
"is that you have time to write your own obituary." After giving a
lovely and lively account of her life, she shows that she lived a life
with the true definition of success in mind. "My beloved Bob, Tessa, and
Riley," she writes. "My beloved friends and family. How precious you
all have been to me. Knowing and loving each one of you was the success
story of my life."
Just months before the historian Tony Judt died of ALS in 2010, he gave an amazing interview to Terry Gross on NPR's
Fresh Air. She asked him about his spiritual beliefs. He
replied:
I
don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple
godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself. But
there's a big "but" which enters in here: I am much more conscious than I
ever was, for obvious reasons, of what it will mean to people left
behind once I'm dead. It won't mean anything for me, but it will mean a
lot to them, and it's important for them, by which I mean my children or
my wife or my close friends, that some spirit of me is, in a positive
way, present in their lives, in their heads, in their imaginings and so
on. So in one curious way I've come to believe in the afterlife as a
place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this
life except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I get
there, it'll be too late. So no god, no organized religion, but a
developing sense that there's something bigger than the world we live
in, including after we die, and that we have responsibilities in that
world.
So whether you believe in an afterlife, as I do, or not, by
being fully present in your life and in the lives of those you love,
you are creating your own afterlife and writing your own eulogy. It's a
valuable lesson, even more so while we have the good fortune of being
healthy and having the energy and freedom and lack of impediments to
create a life of purpose and meaning.
It shouldn't take a near-death experience to remind us of what we're all going to lose one day.
According to Colors magazine,
something called "living funeral therapy" is becoming increasingly
popular in South Korea, which has the highest suicide rate of developed
countries. It can involve actually getting in a coffin and having it
nailed shut, to experience a glimpse of the finality and closure of
death. One operator sometimes has the participants make a list of the
people in their lives who matter to them. One woman said the process
made her realize she'd been neglecting her husband. "I feel like I've
been reborn," she said. "I want to call my husband, to tell him 'thank
you,' and 'sorry.'"
It's an extreme method, and hopefully most of
us won't need to be nailed shut inside a coffin to get a sense of what
we really value. But the good news is that if you're reading this,
there's still time to live up to the best version of your eulogy.
Here are some of my favorite eulogies, courtesy of Alison Nastasi of The Atlantic
. Do you have a favorite eulogy, or something in particular you remember from a eulogy you heard?
