On All Saints’ Day, just as the church was beginning its time dedicated to “memento mori,” or remember your death, there was a terrible tragedy.
A Learjet, copiloted by a 20-year-old woman, began a desperate plunge that would end with the plane shattering and completely disintegrating into tiny fragments in a massive crater on a Florida street. It is horrifying and heartbreaking to listen to the frantic pleas for help uttered by Nathalia, the young copilot. Her last words to air traffic control: “We’re out of time.”
Remember, man, that you are dust and to dust you shall return.
It is rare that we have such a stark reminder of the fleeting preciousness of life. The church, in her wisdom offers us an opportunity every November to contemplate the inevitability of death and to consider how we want to live our lives in light of eternity.
A few years ago, I spent the week from All Saints’ Day to Nov. 8, at my father’s bedside, watching and waiting and praying as he died. With my husband and my children and my sister, we lived memento mori in real life. And then there was a funeral.
They say that funerals will belong to another era before long. More and more, families are opting to skip the funeral. For Catholics, funerals are the way the church provides for us to pray for the soul of the person we love in the presence of the Lord.
Funerals serve a spiritual purpose in more than a liturgical way. For a little while, all the things by which we ordinarily measure a life — productivity, accomplishments, status, the long list of things still undone — fall away. We stop and we grieve, and we remember. There is a certain perspective offered to someone who is pondering life while sitting in the front row at a funeral.
Did you ever stop to think what could be said about you in the first few days after you die? One of the greatest management principles going is to begin with the end in mind. I am not theologically astute enough to offer here an idea of what happens to a soul right after one dies, but I have to think that God is more concerned with the hidden moments of the heart than he is with the résumé.
We spend so much of our lives on the visible things. We set goals and make lists; we measure progress. Some of us spend a lot of time worrying about whether we are doing enough or doing it well enough. Even our efforts to love the people entrusted to us can begin to look like projects to be managed successfully. But that’s not usually what anyone talks about from the front pew at a funeral.
I’ve written a few eulogies in the past few years. What people remember are the ways that you loved. One day, someone will write our eulogies. Right now, we are writing our lives.
There is something both sobering and freeing about that.
The lives best lived are the ones that seize the little opportunities offered every day to stop and have a conversation, to offer our help, to serve in the smallest and least noticeable ways. What really defines the life of a truly great person is the decisions she makes to live a life that is a genuine expression of love.
That’s a very different measure of a good life from the one the world usually offers us. And, if I’m both insightful and brutally honest, it’s often different from the measure I impose upon myself.
What are genuine expressions of love? The things no one seems to notice, for which there is no accounting. The well-timed phone call. The dependable nightly dinner. The prayer nobody knows you prayed — for years.
The longer I live, the more certain I am that living well requires us to stop confusing love with achievement. It isn’t about doing; it’s about surrendering. It isn’t about achieving; it’s about resting. Those times we offer achievements in exchange for love, they’re bartering chips. They ultimately make us anxious. This is a lesson I need to learn again and again: love cannot be earned by excellent performance — not from God and not from one another.
Any life lived long enough will carry some regrets. I regret that I didn’t truly understand that God’s love is not contingent on my performance. I can’t earn it. He doesn’t want me to strive for it. He wants me to rest in it. God made me. He loves me. And maybe that is what frees us to write lives that truly bless the people in the pews at our funerals.
We don’t know when we will be out of time. But we do know that we have time right now. We don’t have to spend it proving ourselves. We can spend it loving.
One day, someone will write our eulogies. Right now, we are writing our lives. Today, while we still have time, we get to decide what we want those lives to say.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
