Call Me Maude

Sometimes I wonder if I think and write about death and funerals too much.  I start wondering if I’m not turning into that old lady played by Ruth Gordon in the movie Harold and Maude--I think her name was Maude.  In the movie, the quirky seventy-nine year-old Maude attends funerals on a regular basis.  During the course of one of the funerals, she befriends Harold, a wealthy, self-destructive teenage boy obsessed with death.  I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed with death, nor would I say I’m especially fascinated by it or afraid of it.  I think I’m more interested in the words that are spoken at funerals and at gravesides--the ones that tell the story of a life.

For many years, I kept the obituary of a man I’d never met, tucked away in the pages of a journal.  Continuing for several columns in the local newspaper, the sheer length of the piece caught my attention.  The obituary detailed the life of a man—a local farmer and pillar of the community—and highlighted the many ways he served his family, his community, and his church.  This man’s life bore spectacular witness to noble virtues like decency, hard work, faithfulness, integrity, and generosity.  I remember pulling the notice out of the local paper and showing it to my husband, wondering aloud, “How do you get to be the kind of person who gets something like that written about you?”

During the months when my father was being treated for a brain tumor, I drove back and forth many times across the state of Pennsylvania to be with him.  I had a lot of time to think during those drives, and, in my head, I began writing my father’s eulogy as I drove.  I was helpless to stop the evil that was invading his brain and stealing his life, but at least I could piece together words and sentences to honor the life of the faithful, hard-working father I loved.  There were things I felt needed to be said about his life.  His story needed to be told.

Recently I’ve come across several thoughtful pieces about writing obituaries and eulogies, those important end-of-life stories.   David Rupert at Red Letter Believers wrote of both the privilege and challenge he faced in trying to reduce his father’s life story to 125 words, the limit set by the local newspaper.  Jennifer at Getting Down With Jesus wrote about seeing the dash on tombstones, that tiny mark of punctuation that signifies the life lived between a person’s date of birth and date of death.  Both of these pieces are excellent, and both highlight the reality that each day we live is an opportunity to write our own life story.  Each day we are given the opportunity to write our own eulogy.

Sometimes I wonder what folks will say of me when I am dead and gone, having reached the end of my life’s work.  I think about what I’d like to have said about me.  Much of the past twenty years of my life has been invested in raising my kids.  I wonder what my children will say as they look back on those years.  Will they look back in fondness and with joy, or will they be discussing me with their therapists?  Maybe they’ll just end up hanging out at funerals with quirky nearly eighty-year old women while trying to make sense of it all.

There are a lot of things I didn’t get right, things I would go back and do over if I could.  But I can’t.  And, maybe, by God’s grace, I got a few things right along the way.  I was sharing some of my regrets with the ladies in my Bible study one week, admitting some of my shortcomings, hoping to encourage them with my cautionary tales of what not to do.  My Bible study leader listened and then offered this:

Whatever mistakes you made, whatever you got wrong, at least your kids know this:  They know your God is real.

Right then, I knew what I wanted my eulogy to say.  I don’t need a long obituary written about me or a lengthy speech delivered at my graveside.  Whatever I got right or didn’t along the way, I hope I am living a life that bears faithful witness to the reality of the God who is and was and ever will be.  At the end of my life, whatever else is said about me, I hope that my life’s story can be summarized in these six simple words:

We knew her God was real.

How about you?  If you were writing your own eulogy, what would you want it to say?

Linking, rather belatedly, with the sisterhood: