Nothing like a funeral to get you thinking about the end

My dad turned 70 last year and he’s been joking about how all his friends are dying ever since. I’m sure when he turns 80 and 90 he will complain again, but it does get you thinking.

At the most recent funeral, the mother of my friend Charles, we reflected on her legacy. The family she left behind and the memories she made.

It got me thinking. Why does it take a funeral to reflect on a life? Why not reflect on it now?

Write your own eulogy

In Dr. Stephen Covey’s influential book 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People he has a very well known eulogy exercise where he asks you to imagine your own funeral and to record what people might say about you.

Now if imagining your funeral eulogy is a bit macabre, you can do the same exercise but imagine it is your 86th birthday party instead.

Many of your friends and family have come to celebrate your long and amazing life.

Try the Covey exercise but from the standpoint of you still being alive to hear it. What do you want them to say about you during the birthday speeches?

If speech writing isn’t your thing, another exercise is to imagine the epitaph you would like carved on your tomb stone. Thomas Jefferson gave very specific instructions on what he wanted carved on his. The inscription, as he stipulated, reads:

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson author of the Declaration of American Independenceof the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.

You might not have anything nearly as grand as this to carve on yours, but think about your life, your passions, the difference you made, the people you served and what you left behind.

Structure those five sections into an epitaph and then start to build a life which makes these words come true.

What do you want to be remembered for?

Our lives can quickly be put into perspective when we think about the end.

When we are young, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we have plenty of time and life goes on forever.

If you think about your funeral, visualise all the people who might be there and what they will say about you. It can be sobering to think of what they might have to say right now.

For the sake of the exercise, imagine you are at a funeral – it is your funeral. There are four people who are going to be speaking about you. One is a close family member; one is a close friend; one is someone you worked closely with, and the last is someone from your community.

What do you want them to say about you?

Do you have it clear? Good. Now what would it take to make this version of you come true? Starting today.