What Would I Want in My Eulogy?

I am taking a course called Perspectives on Death and Dying. For this class, we were required to journal about how we want to live our lives (i.e. what do I want people to remember about me?). The following is what I wrote.

Faith
Most importantly, I would want to have served Christ with my whole life—recklessly and wholeheartedly. I think it would be awesome to get to die for the gospel (if I am even worthy of that honor). I don’t want Christ to be ashamed of me, but rather that I would faithfully serve him.

Family
I want to love my husband, and I want to love my children in a way that I am willing to make great sacrifices for them. If I go before my husband, I want to have loved him in such a way that a second wife would never compare (though, I freely give my full permission for him to remarry)! I want to raise my children so that they can never say their mother didn’t spend enough time with them or that she didn’t answer their “why” questions.

Friends
I hope people will say that I wasn’t afraid of anything, that I wasn’t afraid to take risks and try new things. I want to live my life in a way that everyone I encounter can honestly know I didn’t gossip or cheat or lie while I was alive. I want to share wise advice whenever I can, never watering things down just to make people feel better; but I hope I never think of myself as wise.

Career
I want them to say I was multi-talented. I hope that I do not use all my resources in a single dead-end job for the rest of my life, but rather that I experience the whole gamut of what my talents will let me do. I hope I allow myself to be real with people and experience relationships—experience the bad and the good. I hope I let myself get hurt and that I see the positive when I do get hurt. I hope I’ll be remembered as a happy woman. Something I have already instituted in my everyday life is constant smiling in an attempt to make everyone else’s day better, everyday.

What I want to leave behind…
I want to travel all over the world, if I can. Being remembered as a world-traveler would make me seem mysterious and exciting to my grandchildren! I want to leave behind a gazillion photos for them to dig through along with my artwork, journals and souvenirs from my world travels. And finally, over the years, as I try recipes I want to make them my own and leave them behind for others to enjoy and remember: “Man, could that woman cook!”