I am in a constant state of writing my eulogy and urging my children to do the same : 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 dont 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 kids Little League games because he always wanted to go over those figures one more time. Or: She didnt 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. huffingtonpost/arianna-huffington/are-you-living-your-eulogy-or-your-resume_b_3936937.html
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 03:03:11 +0000