Funeral and memorial services can be “by the book” with very little personal input or take-aways for friends and family, but, increasingly, eulogies may include some pointers on moving forward.

Here are some examples of how obituaries and memorial services speak to us and what we can learn.

Be an organ donor!

A celebration for the life of …

I have been hanging on to this wonderful list of life lessons waiting for the New Year to let them loose. They were allegedly written by 90-year-old Regina Brett for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.

In reality, Brett is much younger – not much more than half of 90. She’s been writing award-winning columns for the paper since 2000, and when she turned…

Ryan Means had dreamed of joining the Army since the age of six, but it was not until his childhood playmate and best buddy Adam White was killed in the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers that he was mobilized into action. The despair of riding his bike around New York City, posting flyers, checking in with hospitals, and, finally, accepting that Adam was dead were…

Sometimes it’s pretty hard to find a silver lining in a tragic event – particularly the loss of a valued friend or family member. But time, the most enduring healer, and patient reflection can often point to something positive that resulted from a terribly sad time.



A little over a year ago, a college friend, Sally Chambers Bond, was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. She was devastated. She was brave. She was hopeful. With courage and grace she took on the treatments we…

During my siblings’ annual New Year’s Eve celebration in Bluffton, S.C. several years ago, my brother, Mike, pulled out a tattered, red spiral notebook he had discovered in a box. The distinctive handwriting was unmistakable – our mother’s script, written in a sort of back-slanted, left-handed style unlike any other. The pages were filled with her thoughts, life lessons and musings written about a year before she died at age 45.

My sister Wendy took the notebook…

My mother’s birthday was July 25. She would have been 87, hard for me to even imagine as she died at age 45 in 1968 – 42 years ago. A whole lifetime ago. So many culture changes ago. So many upheavals ago – none of them, however, as devastating as losing a mother at a young age.



As my avocation is reading and writing obituaries, wanting to always know more about what makes people tick – even when they are no longer ticking – I’ve been thinking about how her…

Is awareness of all things death-related a perception thing? That once you’ve lost someone, you become more aware of the buzz around you about death and grieving? Or is it that, as part of the aging process, we are all more accepting of our mortality and others’ too? Or could it be that as we age and lose loved ones, we are all just plain paying more attention to the topic – and talking about it more?



A recent spate of death-related stories in the media – all this month – leads me…