HUFFINGTON
02.23.14
THRIVE
“He never made it to his kid’s
Little League games because he
always had to go over those figures
one more time.”
Or:
“While she didn’t have any real
friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with
every email in her in-box every
night.”
Or:
“His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared.”
Our eulogies are always about
the other stuff: what we gave, how
we connected, how much we meant
to our family and friends, small
kindnesses, lifelong passions, and
the things that made us laugh.
So why do we spend so much of
our limited time on this earth focusing on all the things our eulogy
will never cover? “Eulogies aren’t
résumés,” David Brooks wrote.
“They describe the person’s care,
wisdom, truthfulness and courage. They describe the million little
moral judgments that emanate
from that inner region.”
And yet we spend so much time
and effort and energy on those
résumé entries—entries that lose
all significance as soon as our heart
stops beating. Even for those who
die with amazing Wikipedia en-
tries, whose lives were synonymous with accomplishment and
achievement, their eulogies focus
mostly on what they did when they
weren’t achieving and succeeding. They aren’t bound by our current, broken definition of success.
Look at Steve Jobs, a man whose
life, at least as the public saw it,
was about creating things— things
that were, yes, amazing and game
changing. But when his sister,
Mona Simpson, rose to honor him
at his memorial service, that’s not
what she focused on.
Yes, she talked about his work
and his work ethic. But mostly
she raised these as manifestations
of his passions. “Steve worked at
what he loved,” she said. What
really moved him was love. “Love
was his supreme virtue,” she said,
“his god of gods.
“When [his son] Reed was
born, he began gushing and never
stopped. He was a physical dad,
with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and
Erin’s travel and skirt lengths
and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.”
And then she added this touching image: “None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will
ever forget the scene of Reed and
Steve slow dancing.”
His sister made abundantly
clear in her eulogy that Steve