What Would Your Eulogy Say?

Over the past five months I have helped care for someone who is seriously ill. This time has brought me face to face with all kinds of philosophical issues. As I helped my friend think about some of the decisions she (or someone she loves) might need to make at the end of her life, it of course made me think about them in relationship to my own life.

It is interesting to me how often we put off these conversations, or put off thinking about our own death. It’s gonna happen, we can count on it. A few years after Vince and I were married we completed a ten day residential retreat at the ToDo Institue in Vermont. There were two exercises that we completed during the retreat that have stayed with me over the past ten years. The first one was that I had to spend the entire day without saying the word “I”. That’s enough to freak a person out. Anyway, the exercise relevant to this rambling is the exercise where we wrote our own eulogy and then had to lie in a make shift coffin (with a sheet over us) while someone read our eulogy. I recognize this might sound freaky. But honestly, it was really powerful. What would your eulogy say?

Would your eulogy say that you were not afraid to open your heart? Would it say that you weren’t scared to be compassionate? Would it say that you were “devoted” to your job or devoted to seeing love in everyone you met? Are you living the live you want? Are you acting in accordance with your values, with what you believe? Have you prioritized in a way that allows you to do what you love? Are you surrounded by people you love? Are you living a life of obligation?

We are given the opportunity in our yoga practice to be in savasana (corpse pose) at the end of our asana practice. I realize that sometimes we see this as resting, or recovery from a strong practice. It seems to me that if we use it as rest and/or recovery, we are missing a great opportunity to become more and more intimate with death. This doesn’t need to be morbid. It could be a reminder that the body will die. It will die. It could serve as a reminder that who you are inhabits a body or that your body is the vessel that houses your soul. It could be a reminder that every moment is fresh and the moment before this one died, it doesn’t exist anymore except in our memory. It could be a reminder that the present moment is all that exists. It could remind us that we get to start over and over and over every moment.

We can be grateful that we have a yoga practice that allows us to see past these bodies we live in.