Almost No One Reads Their Own Eulogy

A close friend of mine had a big birthday a few years ago. He didn't ask his grown kids for gifts. He asked for one thing: write my eulogy.

Not to read at his funeral. To hand to him now - while he was still alive to read it himself.

I haven't stopped thinking about that.

There's one famous case where someone did. By 1888, Alfred Nobel was one of the richest men in Europe. He owned over 350 patents. He had factories in more than 20 countries. That year, a French newspaper made a mistake. His brother had died, but the paper printed Nobel's obituary instead. The headline called him "the merchant of death." It said his whole life added up to one thing: the explosives that made him rich.

Nobel read it. And it changed him. In a few years, he rewrote his will. That will created the Nobel Prizes - his way of leaving behind a different story than the one he'd just read about himself.

Most of us never get a warning like that. We never get to read our own eulogy and fix things while we still can. My friend, by asking his kids to write his, found a way to get close.

I don't know what they wrote. That part is his story, not mine to tell. What stuck with me was the request itself. He wanted to know, on purpose, how his life reads - before it's too late to change it.

Here's something worth noticing about eulogies: what goes in them depends on who's writing, and who they're writing for.

A private funeral - the kind most of us will have - uses one template. The room is full of family and friends. The eulogy comes only from a person's Personal life: marriage, kids, friendships, the character people saw up close. Nobody stands up and talks about a hard Tuesday meeting at work. That's not a mistake. It's just not what this template is for.

But there's a second template. It doesn't get used as often. When a president or another public figure dies, the eulogy usually has two parts. It still talks about their Personal life - but it also talks about their Work life: the choices they made in office, their policies, their public record, their calling. A public life earns a second part that a private life, on its own, does not.

Notice something else: neither template ever talks about sleep. But how well someone lives both other parts of life - how well they walk with people, how well they work at their calling - depends a lot on that hidden third part. No one writes a eulogy about your sleep. But everyone, without knowing it, is writing about what your sleep, your rest, made possible.

In both templates, a living person writes the eulogy. And that person only saw part of the story - the part they were there for.

Here's a question: what if there's a third kind of funeral? A Day of Judgment. What if, at that funeral, the Person writing the eulogy was there for all of it? Not just the Personal part, like family and friends. Not just the Work part, like coworkers or a nation. All of it. Every day. Every part - even the parts no human writer ever sees.

And what if that Writer uses the public template for everyone - not the private one? Not because your work was famous. But because He was actually there for every bit of it, the way a nation's writers are only there for a president's life.

In my last post, I talked about the gap between Work life and Personal life. I showed two blocks of nearly equal size making up a day, with a real gap in between. That gap has shape: different things, different people, different places. And underneath it all, two different rules - the fast cause-and-effect of Work, and the slow cause-and-effect of Personal and moral life.

Picture your life as a long strip of film.

I first taught this picture back in 1990, in a class about time management. One student walked in doubting he'd learn much. Afterward, he told me this was the one thing that actually changed him.

Each day isn't one photo. It's a full reel - a 24-hour ring, cut into pieces. Some of that reel is Sleep. Some is Personal. Some is Work.

Now picture someone splicing all your Personal footage into one tape, and all your Work footage into another. Two tapes, running side by side, day after day, year after year. String enough days together, and each tape becomes a story - a line, made from thousands of small arcs, taped end to end.

That's what a life story really is. Not one long line. Thousands of short arcs, spliced together.

Here's what the chasm actually does. It isn't about how wide the gap looks on any one day. It's about what happens to the footage on each side of it, arc after arc, year after year.

A chasm left alone doesn't shrink the Work tape. It can leave it grainy. Thin. Hard to follow. Cut off from the rest of the reel - even while the Personal tape, running right next to it, stays rich and clear.

That's the real cost. Not a shorter tape. A weaker one. And when the whole reel finally gets played back - at a funeral, or before Someone Who was there for every frame - a weak tape still shows.

Let me be clear: this isn't a push to shoot more footage. More hours won't fix grainy film. The real question was never about how much tape you or I have. It's about whether the footage on both tapes - Personal and Work - is worth splicing into one true reel, or whether it plays like two different movies running side by side.

Is there any proof that God actually uses this two-part template - Personal life and Work life both - when He writes the story of a life? Not just a guess. Something written down. Something we can go and read, about real people.

It turns out there is. And where it comes from surprised me. More on that next time.

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