WRITING YOUR OBITUARY
This is a practice I have done before, but one that I want to bring in specifically during Elul when we have the opportunity to do a thorough Cheshbon Hanefesh, a soul accounting. The simple idea is to write as if you were delivering your own eulogy. Be as honest as possible. Cry a little or a lot. After all, you’ve died.
Then look at the gap between how you think you will actually be remembered and how you want to be remembered. See what you can do, specific steps, in the next year to move towards how you want to be remembered.
Before I ask a few questions to stimulate your thinking, (if you need it), I want to offer a few reflections. First, our deaths are a question of when, not if. We will all die—humans, birds, trees, rocks, the billions of microscopic beings who die every day that we may live our materially comfortable lives—we will all die.
Individual deaths may be premature and tragic. I can’t imagine losing one of my children. There’s a catbird in the little woods in the backyard where I sit who I imagine has lost his/her partner in the storm that we had a few weeks ago that knocked down hundreds of trees, and s/he cries. These are individual tragedies, but not ecosystem tragedies. The world has enough people, and another catbird couple will fill that niche. The robin whose babies are food for the hawk’s nestlings goes onto to have another set.
We will all die. Every day I pray “there is no life without death, and there is no death without life.” While it might be obvious that you can’t die if you haven’t lived, it’s equally plain, if more distasteful to think about, that there is no life without death. This is the great cycle of birth and death that provides the context for all life and death on this earth and in the very cosmos.
OK, here are some questions to consider.
What have I accomplished in the human world? What was my attitude towards those accomplishments—satisfaction, dissatisfaction, puzzlement, pride, rage at being stuck in a menial job?
How was my family life? What worked and what did not?
How was my participation in beloved communities? Did I feel I truly belonged somewhere? What kind of a difference did I make for those communities?
What was my relationship with the more than human world?
