A Personal Eulogy

Today, I assigned my public speaking students to prepare for a two-minute read speech. They have to deliver next week a personal eulogy. Morbid, [ikr] I know right. That was the same reaction I had I when went through writing my personal eulogy, more than five years ago.

The term eulogy is derived from the Greek word "eulogia" which means good words. This type of writing or speech is delivered to honor a person or any thing. Traditions put eulogy as an important speech to honor the recently deceased. Thus, it is often heard during necrological services or funerals. Perhaps, its appropriateness in honoring the dead is to lighten the feelings of the bereived.

So, the eulogy gives a review of hallmarks in the lived life of the deceased. It is not a biography but strings a heartening narrative of how well the person lived his life.

It was an excruciating, yet a transforming experience for me to write me personal eulogy. I was afraid of death, it was one of my greatest fear, but not to the point that thanatophobia would impair my dispositions in life. It just happened that I lived a life afraid of what's going to happen next in my after life and to my loved one's when I was gone.

It would have not been possible for me to write my personal eulogy, had I now overcome my fear of death. That's another story though. But, I was motivated to write my own, when I began to understand that individuals have the power over their life affairs and choices in life, if they could write their own life script. All lifescipts have endings.

The self-help guru, Stephen Covey, was right when he said that to be highly effective, one needs to begin with the end in mind. So, I had to think of how I would desire my life to an end. Of course, that was a fulfilled and completed. I had project how I would like people to think of me as person when my time comes to an end. It took me several days before I lifted my pen and draw out from within me, desires of how I wante my life to be.

That was one of the steps I took so I could manage and take in charge of life. In my silence, I visulalized my body lying on a coffin and went through imagining what I would like people to hear about me as to how I would have lived my life. It was transformative for me, because the process helped me to identify milestones and hallmarks of the various aspects of my life - my career, my financial state, my emotional state, my values, my relationships, and my faith.

Likewise, the process brought me to a realization of the life continuum and the power of self will and self-discipline that God would also like His children to acquire. It empowered me in a great sort to establish my self and my dispositions in relation to the things that I do now. It also allowed me to see my frailties in the past, which I need to deal with to fulfill how I wanted myself to live my life.

It was also mushy for me, I did shed some tears after knowing that I can actually create my life script. I was mushy then because, my life was really topsy-turvy at that time. I succeeded though. Fact, many of the things that I wrote in personal eulogy had transpired, and I began to appreciate life at its best as lived with personal control.

It made me happier somehow and it gave me a positive perspective about death and its connection to life.