Is your life on the path you want it to be? Writing your own eulogy can bring clarity
As we settle into our fall routines, there is one suggestion that can help us stay on our chosen life course: It’s time for you to write your own eulogy.
I don’t mean write the one that will actually be read at your funeral, although it could be used that way. What I mean is write out what you want people to say about you at the end of your life — and then focus on making those things reality.
New York Times bestselling author Donald Miller says he thinks that what most people are looking for is not how to be more productive, or how to make a million dollars in six months. What they are really looking for is meaning. In his book, “Hero on a Mission,” he devotes several chapters to writing one’s own eulogy and invites his readers to be specific in the vision for their lives. Miller reads his every day as part of his morning routine. It’s a form of goal-setting, one that works backward from the end of our lives to the present day.
Similarly, in 1984, then-Elder Russell M. Nelson addressed BYU students and asked them to “Begin with the End in Mind.” He asked them to think about “What would you like said about you at your funeral? Or, if you were to write your own eulogy and you could have only three sentences (no big flowery speeches, please), what would you want to say?”
Holly Richardson lived a heart-centered life for nearly a century. She loved people and she loved talking to them and sharing their stories. She considered herself a life-long learner and even though she earned a Ph.D when she was 57, she also knew that much learning could and did most often happen outside the classroom.
She loved her husband, Greg, and the life they built together. She spent four decades dedicated to being a mother to her 25 children (yes, I have 25) and then the next three decades devoted to a career she loved: writing, speaking and teaching. Holly’s love for travel and the people of the world took her to 100 countries. She taught herself a third and then a fourth language in her 60′s. In her ninth decade, she spent time traveling with each of her many grandchildren and great-grandchildren….
If you aren’t sure where to start when writing your own eulogy, you might begin by asking yourself the question Steve Jobs asked himself every day for 33 years: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” He told Stanford graduates in a 2005 commencement speech that whenever the answer to that question had been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, he knew he needed to change something. He also told those students that “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”
Columnist David Brooks calls them “eulogy virtues,” rather than “résumé virtues.” The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace, he wrote in 2015. Brooks said the “eulogy virtues” could be considered a “moral bucket list.” Some of the traits he considered essential for a rich inner life included these:
- Humility. In a selfie culture, these people have achieved “an intense self-awareness from a position of other-centeredness.”
- Self-defeat. External success is often achieved through competition with others. But “character is built during the confrontation with your own weakness.”
- Dependency: People on the road to self-mastery know that they can’t get there alone. “Individual will, reason and compassion are not strong enough to consistently defeat selfishness, pride and self-deception. We all need redemptive assistance from outside.”
- Energizing love: This kind of love “decenters the self” and brings joy in serving that (or those) which you love.
- The call within the call: This, Brooks explains, are the experiences that turn a career into a calling.
- The conscience leap: People on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? “They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?” And then they follow the path that takes them there, winding and full of pitfalls as it may be.
The bottom line for me is this: We never really know how much time we have on this earth. Are we doing what we love with that time? Are we spending time with people we love? Are we focusing where we should? Are we making a difference? Or are we putting off for “some day?” Some day, we’ll take that vacation. Some day I’ll write down my stories for my grandkids. Some day I’ll take them on a trip. Some day I’ll use that china. Some day I’ll write that thank you note.
When my eulogy is read for the final time, I hope it includes these three sentences:
Holly was a woman of faith who lived fully and loved deeply.
She was devoted to her family and her community.
She made a difference.
