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. What career highlights or life accomplishments should we bring up? What was he known for? How could we best capture his personality? Obituary Eventually 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’t know him got a glimpse of who he was. People who did know him wrote us lovely notes along the lines of, “Yes! That’s the man I remember!” or “I didn’t know that about him.” Eulogy For 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. To Summarize a Life Thinking back on a person and trying to summarize a life—that’s quite an undertaking. Sobering, too, for the person doing the thinking, writing, and summarizing. As 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. What is a life? What is...my life? What 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? What values would they remark on? What passions or hobbies? How would they describe my personality? What would they say was my legacy—what did I leave behind in the world? Creative Writing Assignment Creative writing teachers often make this assignment: to write your own obituary or eulogy. But you don’t write it as if you’re going to die tomorrow. Don’t worry at all about when or how you might die. That’s not part of this reflection. Instead, focus on how you will live. Project yourself into the future and try to imagine how you will have lived. Just talking about it creates a verb tense challenge—following through with the assignment is a bit of a mind bender. You project yourself into the future and reflect back on your life as if you’ve already lived it. What life do you want to have lived? By writing your own obituary, you figure out the life you’ve lived thus far, and the life you want to live from this point forward. It’s a useful exercise for creative writing and...for life. Viktor Frankl's Daily Exercise, Expanded Viktor Frankl offer a daily exercise that Donald Miller summarized in a blog post. Frankl “taught 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.” It’s a mind trick. Miller points out it calls us to “evaluate the decisions we will make that day before we make them, and as such, avoid regret.” In other words, you live the day the way you intended to live it. In a similar way, we can expand Frankl’s 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. Best Case Scenarios This 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’t play out worst-case scenarios.