The eulogy at yours you hope they can give

· 11 min read

The forensic frame

The exercise only works if you switch from aspirational to forensic. Stop imagining what you want them to say. Imagine what they would actually be able to say given the data you have given them. The aspirational version is comfortable and useless. The forensic version is uncomfortable and operative. The gap between the two is your assignment. BJ Miller's hospice writing makes this point repeatedly: the version of yourself that emerges in late illness is the version your loved ones have been quietly seeing all along — and they are usually neither surprised nor as fooled as you hoped.

Presence-debt

Most of us are carrying presence-debt to our partners — accumulated moments of physical-co-presence-without-attentional-co-presence. The phone in the hand during the conversation. The dinner during which you were elsewhere. The vacation week you spent answering email. Presence-debt is invisible at the time and obvious in retrospect, especially when retrospect is forced by loss. The eulogy will reveal it. The partner who can say they were really with me, when they were with me is the partner of someone who paid down their presence-debt in life. Pay it down now.

The unglamorous virtue of reliability

Nobody dreams of being eulogized for reliability. It sounds boring. It is, however, what surviving partners actually need to be able to say. They did what they said they would do. I could call them and they would answer. They came home. Reliability is the substrate on which everything else stands. Without it, the more vivid virtues — passion, humor, brilliance — float free and provide no shelter. The eulogy that mentions reliability is mentioning the bedrock of the partnership. If your partner could not honestly include this in your eulogy, the relationship has a foundation problem that the more glamorous virtues cannot solve.

The growth question

Have you grown during this relationship, or have you held station while they grew, or have you both grown but in directions that no longer intersect? The eulogy will require an answer. The partner who can say they became more themselves over the years and made room for me to become more myself is describing a marriage that did the work of co-development. Most do not. Most relationships involve at least one partner who quietly stops developing somewhere in their mid-thirties and treats the relationship as a stable container rather than a growing organism. The eulogy reveals which kind you have been.

The capacity for repair

John Gottman's research — though not in your citation pool, the principle is widely echoed in Fisher and others — identifies repair attempts as one of the strongest predictors of relationship endurance. The partner who can apologize, who can come back after harm, who can name the rupture and seek to mend it, is the partner whose eulogy will include the line they knew how to come back to me. The partner who cannot is the partner whose eulogy will quietly omit the apology section because there were not enough of them to include.

The witness question

They saw me. This is one of the most powerful things a surviving partner can say, and one of the hardest to earn. To be seen by your partner is not the same as being loved by them. You can be loved by someone who does not really know you. You can be married to someone for thirty years and remain, in some essential way, a stranger to them. The eulogy that contains they saw me is delivered by someone whose partner did the work of actually paying attention to who they were. Susan Anderson's writing on attachment is full of the quiet damage done by being loved-but-not-seen.

The omissions you would not want

Every eulogy omits things. The question is which omissions would feel honest and which would feel like dodges. The partner who has to skip your worst decade because there is no graceful way to mention it is a partner who has been carrying that decade for a long time. The omissions in the eulogy you imagine being given about you are a list of your unrepaired chapters. You still have time to repair some of them. Not all. Some.

The voice you would want them to be able to use

Steady or breaking — same question as the inverse exercise, but pointed at you. Would you want them to be able to speak about you with a certain steady gratitude, or would you want them to be undone by the loss? Both have their own honesty. But notice that the steady gratitude version is usually only available to partners who have completed the in-life work of mutual appreciation. The undone-by-loss version, while moving, can sometimes mask a relationship in which much was left unfinished. Bonanno's work suggests the steadier voice is often the more deeply attached, not the less.

What they have been noticing

Your partner has been collecting data about you that you have not been collecting about yourself. They know which version of you arrives home tired. They know which subjects make you defensive. They know what you avoid. The eulogy will be drawn from this dataset, not from your self-image. If you want to know what they would honestly be able to say, you can — carefully, in a non-defensive moment — ask them what they think your strengths and weaknesses as a partner have been. The answer will be a draft of the eulogy. Listen without flinching.

The gift of becoming the truth

The deepest version of this exercise is recognizing that the eulogy you want them to be able to give is itself a love letter — a love letter you write to them by becoming, in life, the person they will not have to fabricate at your service. To make their grief easier by having been a partner whose virtues they do not have to invent — this is one of the more concrete gifts you can give the person you love. They will have enough to bear. Make at least the description of you not be one of those things.

Writing your own version

Pennebaker's expressive writing protocol applies here too. Sit down and try to write the eulogy your partner would honestly be able to give about you today. Do it without flinching. Do not edit. The exercise is for you alone. You will discover, in the writing, which sentences come easily and which require fabrication. The fabricated sentences are your renovation list. The easy sentences are the foundation you have actually built. Both pieces of information are valuable. Most people refuse to do this exercise because they suspect, correctly, that it will be uncomfortable. The discomfort is the point.

The deadline is unknown but real

You do not know when the eulogy will be needed. You only know it will be. The deadline is genuinely unknown, which makes it easier to ignore than a deadline that is fixed, but no less real for being unknown. Ira Byock's hospice patients almost universally reported that the unknown deadline was the one they took least seriously until it became known, at which point the runway had collapsed. Take the unknown deadline seriously now, when there is still runway. The eulogy is being drafted by your conduct this week.

What Law Five asks here

Revise yourself, while you still can, into the person your partner will not have to euphemize. This is the most personal application of Law Five available to you in love. It is not about becoming impressive. It is about becoming describable in truth. The eulogy you hope they can give is the shape of the partner-self you have not yet finished becoming. The good news is that the eulogy is not yet final. The work is available, today, to make tomorrow's honest summary a little more generous, a little less softened, a little more true. Do the work. They will be grieving you soon enough. Make at least their description of you a kindness.

Citations

1. Byock, Ira. The Four Things That Matter Most: A Book About Living. New York: Free Press, 2004. 2. Byock, Ira. Dying Well: Peace and Possibilities at the End of Life. New York: Riverhead, 1997. 3. Miller, BJ, and Shoshana Berger. A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019. 4. Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Knopf, 2005. 5. Oates, Joyce Carol. A Widow's Story: A Memoir. New York: Ecco, 2011. 6. Bonanno, George A. The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. New York: Basic Books, 2009. 7. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, and David Kessler. On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. New York: Scribner, 2005. 8. Pennebaker, James W. Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2016. 9. Anderson, Susan. The Journey from Abandonment to Healing. Rev. ed. New York: Berkley, 2014. 10. Fisher, Bruce, and Robert Alberti. Rebuilding: When Your Relationship Ends. 4th ed. Atascadero, CA: Impact Publishers, 2016. 11. Lamott, Anne. Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair. New York: Riverhead, 2013. 12. Boss, Pauline. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

◆

Cite this:

View edit history

← PreviousHow Community Development Financial Institutions Revise Lending Models Continue →The deathbed conversation you want to be able to have

Comments

Be the first to share how this landed.