Obituaries have a bad rap: morbid little articles that sum up your life when you die.
But what if writing your obituary could be used as a tool to shift how you live?
Obituary Writing is a Deeply Revelatory, Deeply Vulnerable
I attended a death café a few months ago and this was the question we were asked:
“How do you want to be remembered?”
I remember we all looked at the plush carpets, or out the window, or got real busy picking at the threads in our clothes. We were reluctant to share what I’ve come to realize can be an intimate and self-revelatory piece of writing.
Why is that?
Because writing your obituary drives at the core of your values.
It pokes at all the dreams you clutch to your heart. It forces you to examine how you’ve been living, and whether or not you’ve been living in a way that gets you closer to those lofty achievements penned in your obituary.
An obituary asks, how do you want to be remembered?
In answering a question about being remembered after your death, what you’re really doing is describing how you want to live.
Writing Your Obituary Helps Clarify Your Values
Asking how we want to be remembered is an exercise in uncovering our values.
It helps us create a goal for where we’d like to be.
The remaining task of our days, then, becomes how we will live it out.
Begin with the End in Mind
One of the concepts I teach my students at Bridle Up Hope are the 7 Habits of Highly Effective people. My favorite is Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind.
Typical death doula, yes, I know.
This habit encourages the student to plan out their life by first working backwards: where do you want to be? What goals do you have? How do you want to feel? Great! Now, what must we do to get there?
To help them untangle that hoard of admittedly deep questions, we work together to plot out what that “end in mind” could look like for them.
We work together to craft their personal mission statements. This short document – no more than a paragraph or so – describes the things they’d like to be doing, along with their goals and values.
In the original 7 Habits book (the one written by Stephen Covey for adults, not the teenager’s version, written by Stephen’s son, Sean), the 2nd habit actually begins by asking that you visualize your own funeral.
Specifically, you are asked to imagine your eulogy as if it were being given by the five people closest to you.
What are people saying about you when they come up to the microphone?
Think for a moment about those potential statements: “he was a good father.”
“She was a stubborn mule and could be hard to deal with, but god, I knew she loved me.”
“He worked a lot. I know it was for us, but I never got to spend that much time with him.”
“She inspired me to be a better person.”
What is an obituary if not a written eulogy?
The most obvious difference is that an obituary is printed and a eulogy is spoken; one is a speech, one is a piece of writing.
Done well, they are exceedingly effective, beautiful tributes to the dead. Done well, they provide a glimpse into a rich life of one that once loved and laughed and ached and raged just as deeply as you and I.
Overall, both obituaries and eulogies can be a profound tool for rediscovering (or deciding) who and what you are.
Perhaps that core has been buried or muted beneath a pile of society’s “supposed-to’s.”
Writing your obituary asks “how do you want to be remembered?” And in so doing, it helps you reconnect with parts of you that may have been lost.
How to write your obituary and find clarity
1. Start with a brain-dump
I’m talking about a bulleted list.
Make it as messy as you want.
Include goals, dreams, or achievements you’d like to have done in the next 40 or so years…or when you’re dead. Don’t hold anything back. “Gave a TED Talk.” “Traveled to Fiji.” “Hiked the Appalachian Trail.” “Had three kids, a husband, and a pet possum.”
2. To that brain dump, add in a few of the “intangibles”
You’ve written about what you want to have accomplished. How about the less glamorous but still crucially important things?
What mark do you want to leave on the people around you – your family, friends, and/or your community?
Maybe you want to be remembered as someone who could always make others laugh. Or you hope to have been someone who loved deeply and freely.
3. Combine the tangibles and intangibles.
Once you have both lists, combine them into a rough, working draft.
If this sounds too overwhelming, don’t worry – I get it. This is something I do for my clients who are looking to write obituaries.
Whether they’re writing their own or commissioning me on behalf of a loved one, I’ll help you craft an obituary that uniquely speaks to you (or your person) and weaves in all these tangibles and intangibles into a cohesive portrait of a life.
4. Analyze and strategize
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You’ve written your draft!
Now, take a good, hard look at the things you’ve penned. What actions are you taking in your life to get you closer – if only by a tiny inch – to those goals?
If you wrote, “I want to give a TED talk,” great! Are you devoting some time to mastering a subject so you are a true expert in your field?
If you wrote, “I want my children to know how much I love them,” have you told them that lately? What have you been doing to show that?
Final Thoughts
While you can certainly publish this obituary if you are doing this in preparation for your (impending) death, writing your obituary can also be an exercise for you alone.
Contemplating how you want to be remembered is an unprecedented opportunity to ask yourself, what values do I want to uphold?
How can I make that reflect, just a little bit, in my mundane, day-to-day interactions? How can I live today in line with the vision of how I’d want future generations to remember me?
And this is truly empowering. What freedom indeed.
