Ep 149: Write Your Own Obituary
When my dad died in March, our family worked together to write the obituary. Each of us thought back on his life to decide the right stories to tell, the best details to share.\n\nWhat career highlights or life accomplishments should we bring up? What was he known for? How could we best capture his personality?\nObituary\nEventually we landed on a version of the obituary to publish in the local newspapers, to be read by family and friends and maybe a few strangers. People who didn\u2019t know him got a glimpse of who he was. People who did know him wrote us lovely notes along the lines of, \u201cYes! That\u2019s the man I remember!\u201d or \u201cI didn\u2019t know that about him.\u201d\nEulogy\nFor the funeral service, my brother wrote a eulogy. Eulogies are more personable than obituaries, as they tend to be presented through the lens of the speaker and reflect that relationship, though the eulogy might be delivered by a pastor who interviews people and pulls together their stories into one cohesive piece.\nTo Summarize a Life\nThinking back on a person and trying to summarize a life\u2014that\u2019s quite an undertaking. Sobering, too, for the person doing the thinking, writing, and summarizing.\n\nAs I wrote reflections about my dad for the service, I began to wonder about my own life. Maybe funerals bring that out in all of us who attend. We think about our lives today, our lives in the future.\n\nWhat is a life?\n\nWhat is...my life?\n\nWhat would I want to be known for? What would someone include in my obituary? What accomplishments would they point to from my youth all the way through my retirement years? How would someone summarize my life?\n\nWhat values would they remark on? What passions or hobbies? How would they describe my personality? What would they say was my legacy\u2014what did I leave behind in the world?\nCreative Writing Assignment\nCreative writing teachers often make this assignment: to write your own obituary or eulogy.\n\nBut you don\u2019t write it as if you\u2019re going to die tomorrow. Don\u2019t worry at all about when or how you might die. That\u2019s not part of this reflection.\n\nInstead, focus on how you will live. Project yourself into the future and try to imagine how you will have lived.\n\nJust talking about it creates a verb tense challenge\u2014following through with the assignment is a bit of a mind bender.\n\nYou project yourself into the future and reflect back on your life as if you\u2019ve already lived it.\n\nWhat life do you want to have lived?\n\nBy writing your own obituary, you figure out the life you\u2019ve lived thus far, and the life you want to live from this point forward.\n\nIt\u2019s a useful exercise for creative writing and...for life.\nViktor Frankl's Daily Exercise, Expanded\nViktor Frankl offer a daily exercise that Donald Miller summarized in a blog post. Frankl \u201ctaught his patients to treat each day as though they were living it a second time, only this time around to not make the same mistakes.\u201d It\u2019s a mind trick. Miller points out it calls us to \u201cevaluate the decisions we will make that day before we make them, and as such, avoid regret.\u201d In other words, you live the day the way you intended to live it.\n\nIn a similar way, we can expand Frankl\u2019s mind trick and look ahead at our entire life as though we are living it a second time, avoiding mistakes and making choices and decisions so that when we get to the end, we lived the life we intended to live.\nBest Case Scenarios\nThis is not an exercise in playing out the future based on where we are at this moment, describing a depressing path assuming nothing changes. Don\u2019t play out worst-case scenarios.\n\nThis is an opportunity to form the life we want to live, dreaming of possibilities if we continue good habits or change bad ones and start living differently today.\n\nIn doing so, we may avoid regret and build a life portfolio of sorts\u2014so that someone can look back at this life we lived and built, and highlight something we hope is worth highlighting.