Be a Eulogy, Not a Resume

lessons on dying well

“Be anything you want to be. And be many things.” — Ralph Lauren 

Edouard Manet, 1867: The Funeral

You don’t realize how complex people are until they’re gone. 

Just a few months ago, I attended a funeral. My high school friend’s father had passed away, and countless people traipsed to the front of the room to share stories. And what did they remember? His contagious laugh. His terrible jokes. His unconditional love for baseball. Not once did his friends tearfully recall, “Ron had such a successful career. So many promotions. So many skillsets. So much money!”

Doing so would have been an injustice to his memory. Why dumb someone down to their resume when they were so much more? There in the crowd, I felt burdened with this question. 

So much of our lives are spent in the realm of the resume. Our digital culture is obsessed with compartmentalization. Nothing is rewarded like distilling our essence down to a punchy headline. Nothing is celebrated like detailing our life’s purpose in a quippy, X-bio-worthy one-liner. So, we work hard to resume-ify ourselves, to appear sleek and crisp and digestible. We consider this “leveling up.” But I’m afraid we might just be dumbing ourselves down. 

We’re mesmerized with minimalism and oversimplification. The result? We become walking About pages; in-the-flesh LinkedIn profiles; and nothing more than the “Skills” section on our resume. Accomplishments, goals, salaries, and successes — these are the metrics by which we determine a good life. 

But what about a good death? 

There are glaring inconsistencies with how we live and how we die. What matters on your resume probably won’t make it into your eulogy (dare I say, definitely won’t make it into your eulogy). And yet, these are the things we choose to define ourselves. This doesn’t mean we don’t have good intentions — after all, most of us are trying to define our life’s purpose in our X bios. But perhaps we’re so obsessed with defining our purpose that we forget to embody it. 

The mass rush to elevator-pitch our existence means we’re losing pieces of ourselves in the process. Humans aren’t resumes. We’re not designed to fit neatly into a Times New Roman bulleted list. Doing so is an injustice to ourselves. 

In truth, we’re messy, complex, tragic, and beautiful — just like eulogies. And maybe, if we stopped trying to compress ourselves into 260 characters, we would have the freedom to expand into something unimaginable. 

I recently found this note scribbled in an old journal of mine:

What if purpose is like getting dressed in the morning? 

You can throw on and toss off. You can choose, change, and evolve. You don’t have to try something on, say “Found it!”, and wear it for the rest of your life. Instead, you can discover more about yourself each day. 

Writing is a core part of my identity. It’s my career, my hobby, my first love. You’ll see it highlighted in my X bio, woven throughout my resume, and jumping out of my mouth as I shake someone’s hand. Hey, I’m Grace. I’m a writer.  

But if that’s the central theme of my eulogy, something clearly went terribly wrong in my life. How empty. How meaningless. My purpose on this earth isn’t to write. That’s simply a small part of a greater whole. My purpose is multi-faceted and much more complex. It’s to hug my mother when she cries; to surprise my fiancé with his favorite dessert; to take my dog on long walks even when it rains; to laugh so hard with my best friends that no sound comes out; to run across four lanes of traffic to give a homeless woman lunch; to fail at many things with a smile on my face; to be gracious to people who weren’t gracious to me; to love as deeply and widely as Jesus did.

The question is not, how do you want to live? The question is, how do you want to die? Don’t be a resume. Be a eulogy.

---