Living your eulogy or your resume?

There was a great post on Connecting Directors today. It was entitled Are You Living Your Eulogy or Your Resume? It was written by Arianna Huffington and is certainly worth a read. I fought the urge to send it out as a company memo. You can read the piece for yourself (and I suggest you do) - but here's the premise: The bullet points we are constantly trying to add to or live up to on our resumes are not likely to appear anywhere in our eulogy. I remember my grandmother's funeral. She sold insurance for 20+ years - it wasn't mentioned once. Jim's uncle died in February. He was THE small town doctor. I heard from hundreds of people that turned out for his visitation - not one said, "he really did a great job curing my shingles". They talked about his kindness, his humor, the love he had for his patients and his family.

I've been battling with this issue myself for a while. I'm not "ambitious" in the traditional sense. I've discussed it here before - but climbing the corporate ladder and getting the top sales award doesn't appeal to me at all. I realized a long time ago that my legacy wouldn't be forged in a board room. At the end of the day, you are reduced to the nice things (hopefully) people say about you at your funeral. My biggest fear in life is that a) there won't be anyone that comes to my funeral and b) those in attendance will have nothing worthwhile to say about me. Seriously, I worry about this. Occupational hazard? Maybe. It drives Jim nuts.

I'm not going to radically change lives with this blog and Arianna Huffington probably won't with her thought provoking piece - but I hope it does give us all a pause. We get busy. We get caught up. We try so hard to keep our jobs in order to preserve our lives - that we fail to live the lives we are trying so hard to save. Jim and I realize the reality of this better than most. That doesn't necessarily mean we do a better job at doing what's important.

Work isn't bad. It's noble, honorable - and if you are lucky, what you do on a daily basis to earn a paycheck can impact lives in a positive way. I just hope we all look at the other opportunities we have to impact our families, our community. It will be nice to have people say wonderful things about you at your funeral. But, even better - those things will be the true representation of how you lived your life and made the important things a priority.

On a completely related note, my husband is skinning a rattle snake in the garage as I type this. If he goes first, that's definitely going in his eulogy.