Epitaphs and Eulogies are too late
I am getting ready to do a memorial service for a friends mother and I got to thinking, “epitaphs and eulogies are too late.” They usually say such wonderful things about people after they are dead. We should have a place where people can say nice things about others before they are dead. I thought about creating a website “livingeulogies.com” and let people write their thoughts down before their loved ones die.
I have already started writing my wife’s. I keep it on my Palm Pilot and I add to it every time I think of something I love about her. After thinking about it, it dawned on me that I should share it with her now. So here it is. Hopefully it will inspire you to do the same for those you love.
Maybe I should start writing my own. That way I have some idea of what people will say about me after I die.
Jim
I have already started writing my wife’s. I keep it on my Palm Pilot and I add to it every time I think of something I love about her. After thinking about it, it dawned on me that I should share it with her now. So here it is. Hopefully it will inspire you to do the same for those you love.
An Incredible Woman
I have the privilege of being married to the most incredible woman that ever lived on earth. She hears the voice of God and longs for His presence. Her life is an expression of her Maker and she values His presence in others. For her, doing the "right" thing has little to do with political correctness or situational appropriateness. For her, it is always about what God is speaking in the moment. She breathes and bleeds the grace of God. Her heart is bigger than one life can express and she feels deeper than one life can handle. She is an empath and a maverick. She will get inside your heart and never let go. Don't bother asking her for her political views, you won't get the time of day. But talk to her about heart and soul and you'd better be prepared to stay a while. While her unconventional methodology may go against the grain of conservative, fundamental thinking, at the core of all she does is a God who lives outside the box. And where He is, is where she wants to be. I am in love with a woman I can't contain, nor do I want to. She is the epitome of my greatest hero's and the axis of me deepest desires.
Maybe I should start writing my own. That way I have some idea of what people will say about me after I die.
Jim
posted by Spiritual Traveler at 2:20 PM
2 Comments:
This post reminds me of this:
[date]-[date]
A yellowed and brittle copy of an Abraham Lincoln biography from 1963 has been a part of my landscape since I was soft and green myself. My brother moved out of the room we shared when I was 8 and this book was one of the few things he left behind.
A small known fact about me but I'm enamored with Presidential history. I can be quick to recite to you the order of the Presidents, forwards or backwards, tell you which Presidents were born in Virginia, who had the shortest and longest terms in office, and which president initiated the NASA program, as well as all sorts of other bits of executive branch knowledge. That being said, this Abraham Lincoln book has always had an appeal to me though I have never spent any more time with it than would require me to look at all it's wonderful pictures.
Today I undertook the reading of it and on page 39 I read that on April 15th, 1837 Lincoln left his home of New Salem to head to Springfield. New Salem was fast becoming a ghost town as the settlers were moving out of it, northwards. Abraham Lincoln left there on that day at the age of 28 years old with exactly 28 years left to live; to the very day.
It got me to thinking then about the dash between birth and death dates; the small hyphen that becomes the summation of all of our lives. From the big silver-fox cigars to the newborns, breathless in this atmosphere, it's [date] - [date]. Perhaps it's there to teach us some lesson - the lessons we never learn...a lesson that I cannot know here, but only after my death, could only hope I could communicate through that singular dash, the mortar between the entrance and the exit of my life.
And there Abraham Lincoln stood ; on the 15th of April in 1837, on the bisymmetrical cross section of his life, a mildly successful lawyer. A suitcase in hand and his forehead slightly beading with midday sweat. His awkward face ( that with age, enticed a people to fall in love with it's sadness), glancing continually between the train and home, until he boarded the train. Then his intense eyes, under the dark canopy of brow, would draw a bead on the town as the train pulled from the station; watching as it became smaller and smaller until the horizon line engulfed it.
There he clanked along, at the tipping point, the moment of critical mass, the threshold, and the boiling point. Abraham Lincoln, moving on to the bigger and the better, his turning point becoming his tipping point, straddling unawares that dash between the dates of his life..a dash no bigger than the bullet that fell him.
I wonder too if we all have tipping points of significance, the moments of being perfectly balanced on the dash of our dates; the dates we can never know ourselves, when our lives that are measured in the lifetime are one lifetime away. And maybe we've seen it all wrong. Maybe the dash is only a side profile, like the head of Lincoln on a penny, and we were to move to another angle, perhaps from underneath, we'd see that it is just as long as we are old; or as far out as the ripples sprawl when we, the stone, were dropped from the womb into this water. Or maybe it is as long as the shadow of our phantom or perhaps it is as long as the wispy white beard of God himself.
- djh
Wow, that was powerful. Where did you get that?
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