Reverse Engineering Your Obituary
Several prominent people in my life have passed away in the past month. Some I knew well, and others I only knew from a distance. Regardless of my proximity to them, though, they influenced my life in some way. It was a bit surreal reading the obituaries of these folks. It's a weird text to read about people we assume will always be with us. It's a stark reminder of how the end of our lives will be here soon enough.
What will your obituary say? What do you want your obituary to say? I've thought about this topic far too much over the years. Wanna hear about a morbid (yet cool) idea? Try writing your own obituary. Seriously. Someone once asked me to perform this gory task. Write my own obituary as if I'm dead. I found this exercise to be cathartic, but productive. It forced me to really think about how I want to be remembered when I'm gone.
Reading our own obituary is like skipping to the last page of a good book. You see how the story ends, but you don't know how the character got there. And if our obituary is the last page of the story, today is the first page; everything in between is yet to be written.
Here's what struck me about this exercise. If I know what the last page of the story says and what the first page says, I get to be the author of everything in between. The only way to properly author the rest of the story is to reverse engineer the ending. If we're serious about the words we wrote in our obituary, we need to work our way backwards to ensure we get to that place between now and our last breath.
If we want to be known as a loving person, we ought to do loving things.
If we want to be known as a generous person, we ought to be generous.
If we want to be known as great parents, we ought to do things that make us great parents.
I have so much more to say about this topic, including possibly sharing my obituary. But today, I want to leave space for this idea to breathe and allow people to ponder this in their own lives. To be continued.....
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