Living Your Obituary: Why 150 Words Will Reshape 700 Million Breaths

At my uncle's funeral a few years ago, I sat in a back pew next to a cousin I hadn't seen since we were kids. Three people spoke. A priest. My aunt. A friend from the fishing trips my uncle disappeared for every October. Not one of them mentioned his job. Not one mentioned what he earned, what he drove, what the square footage of his house had been, or how much of that square footage had been paid off. They talked about a silver-haired man who always had time, who laughed at his own stories before he finished telling them, who noticed when a kid in the family was having a rough week and called just to ask about school.

Walking out into the parking lot, I thought about what I had been scheduling back at my own desk that morning. A budget meeting. A performance cycle. A 1:1 with someone I had been putting off. Nothing in there was wrong. Nothing in there would survive a eulogy either.

A short piece by the writer Brian Comly, reflecting on his godfather's funeral, names the thing: obituaries are the emotional residue of a life. They are the 150 words that your 700 million lifetime breaths are distilled down to. That framing does something strange to your calendar if you sit with it long enough. The calendar is where the earning and owning happens. The obituary is where it gets filtered out.

The Premise

The exercise I want to make a case for is old. Stoics did a version of it. Tibetan Buddhism makes it central. Stephen Covey put it into a suit and tie in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, where Habit 2 is simply "begin with the end in mind." The modern internet keeps rediscovering it and writing it up as if it's new. It is not new. It is evergreen because it works, and because most people don't do it.

The premise: sit down, in one uninterrupted hour, and write your own obituary. Not the scrubbed LinkedIn version. The real one — the one someone who loved you would read aloud to a room of people you did and didn't know, the one your children would hear and carry forward.

Then put it beside your last full week. Compare.

That's the entire exercise. What makes it hard is not the writing. What makes it hard is the comparison.

Why Obituaries, Specifically

There are cleaner clarifying exercises — writing a mission statement, listing your top five values, doing an annual review. I have tried all of them. They work for a while and then slip, because they are written in the language of aspiration, which is a soft language. Aspiration lets you say things like "I want to be a present parent" while spending Saturday on email.

Obituaries work because they are written in the language of memory. Memory is unsentimental. Memory has no interest in what you meant to do. Memory keeps score on what actually happened — what you said at a table, who you made laugh, who you were in the room for, who you were not. If you try to write your obituary as you would write a self-help plan, the paragraphs go dead on the page. You can hear it.

The obituary forces a second thing: it forces people's names in. Not "my family." Not "my team." The actual names. The brother-in-law you haven't called in a year. The friend from college you meant to stay close to. The kid down the hall, asleep right now, who will be the one reading it at 50.

You cannot write an honest obituary in the abstract. You write it about specific people in specific rooms, and that is where the clarifying happens.

The Gap Nobody Avoids

Here is the part nobody talks about until they sit down and do it: the gap between the obituary and the calendar is often massive, and the calendar wins most weeks.

The obituary talks about being present at dinners. The last two weeks have three dinners missed for video calls. The obituary talks about steady friendship. The last six texts from that friend are unanswered. The obituary talks about patience with a young child. This morning's drop-off had a voice raised about shoes that wouldn't go on.

Once you see the gap, there are two bad responses and one useful one.

The first bad response is to feel guilty for a week, make a grand declaration, and revert by the weekend. The second bad response is to dismiss the exercise — "obituaries are written by other people, what I'd write is performative anyway" — and go back to the calendar. The guilt response looks like motion. The dismissal response looks like wisdom. Both end in the same place.

The useful response is smaller. It is to pick one concrete thing this week that would shrink the gap by a measurable amount. Not five things. One. And to change something structural, not something emotional — because willpower doesn't survive a hard week.

How to Actually Write Your Obituary

There is no correct format. There is, however, a format that produces something worth reading. I have written and rewritten mine enough times to offer one.

Step 1: Give yourself a real hour

Not twenty minutes between meetings. An hour, alone, phone in another room. Pen and paper beats a screen for this, because you will want to cross things out, and typing lets you smuggle in vagueness. Handwriting makes vagueness visible.

Step 2: Write the first sentence last

Obituaries open with identifiers — name, age, where you died, who survives you. Skip that. Start in the middle. Start with a scene. What is the last specific image your youngest child will have of you? What did you say at the table? What were you wearing? Where were your hands?

Step 3: Name the rooms

List, concretely, the rooms your life happened in. The kitchen you cooked in on Sunday mornings. The car you drove the kids to school in. The office. The porch. The hospital bedroom in the last year. Place matters. An obituary without place becomes an abstract CV of virtues. An obituary with place becomes a life.

Step 4: Name the people by name

First, middle, last. What would each of them say you were like, to them, in one sentence? Not "he was generous." What specifically did he do that was generous? Not "she made everyone feel seen." What did seen feel like with her in the room? Force yourself to the specific. If you can't, it means you haven't actually given the generosity or the seeing as much as you thought. That's data.

Step 5: Leave out what does not belong

Omit your job title unless the job was genuinely a vocation that changed other lives. Omit net worth, always. Omit the things you wanted to have done but didn't. The obituary isn't an aspiration document. If it didn't happen, it doesn't go in. This is the bracing part of the exercise — the silence where the things you meant to do but didn't are not recorded.

Step 6: Sit with it for a week

Don't rewrite it in one sitting. Let it live on your desk for seven days. Read it when you're tired. Read it when you're annoyed. Read it on a Sunday morning before anyone else is awake. The parts that still feel true after a week are the ones worth organizing your life around. The parts that feel hollow the second read-through are the ones you wrote because you thought you should.

From the Obituary to Tuesday Afternoon

Writing it is one thing. Letting it actually change a Tuesday afternoon is another. The bridge between the two is almost always small, structural, and repeated.

If your obituary talks about being present at dinners, a small structural change is: phone charges in the kitchen from 6 PM to 8 PM, five nights a week. Not "I will be present more." A rule. Rules survive tired evenings. Intentions don't.

If it talks about a specific friendship, a small structural change is: a standing Sunday evening call, forty minutes, same time every week. Not "I'll text more." A calendar entry with a name.

If it talks about a child seeing you slow down in the mornings, a small structural change is: coffee downstairs, not upstairs; phone in airplane mode until the school drop-off is done. Specific. Bounded. Repeatable.

This is not a life optimization ritual. It is the opposite. It is the recognition that the parts of your life you will actually be remembered for are the parts that happen in small rooms on ordinary days, and that those parts only get protected when the structure around them protects them. The obituary exercise is really a tool for deciding which structures to install.

The Second Pass: Reading Someone Else's

There is a version of this exercise with a second pass that most writers don't mention, and it is the one that has stayed with me longest. After you've written and sat with your own, find an obituary — a real one, for someone you loved — and read it with a pen in hand.

Look for what the writer kept in and what they left out. Notice where the eulogy skipped entire decades of earning and landed instead on a single Tuesday at a lake, a specific phrase the person said whenever you walked into their kitchen, the way they held a grandchild in a bad week. Notice how little of what the person did for a living ends up in the paragraph.

That narrowing — from a whole life to a few vivid moments — is not a failure of memory. It is memory doing its job. It is the mind, without asking permission, filtering a biography down to the parts that mattered. The obituary exercise is an attempt to glimpse that filter while you still have time to live on the other side of it.

Seven hundred million breaths sounds like a lot. Spread across eighty years, it comes to about twenty-five a minute. Most of them are unremarkable. A few dozen — the ones that were held, the ones that came out as laughter, the ones that carried a word that mattered to a specific person in a specific room — are what the 150 words will be made of. The rest is scaffolding.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn't writing your own obituary morbid?

It can feel that way for the first ten minutes. After that, most people find the opposite — it's clarifying, sometimes moving, occasionally funny. Death is the frame, not the subject. The subject is what a life looks like when you strip away everything that doesn't survive a eulogy. Stoics and Buddhists have used this framing for millennia precisely because they found it life-orienting, not life-denying.

How often should I do this exercise?

Once, seriously, is more than most people manage. A good rhythm is once a year — a birthday, a new year, a meaningful anniversary — and to keep the draft somewhere you'll see it. The draft doesn't need to change dramatically each year. What changes is your ability to read it without flinching.

What if my life doesn't feel obituary-worthy yet?

Most people's don't, in the sense the question usually means — not famous, not rich, not titled. Read a few real obituaries from local papers and notice how often the people whose obituaries move you most are ordinary people. The obituary-worthy part is almost always the specific love, the specific attention, the specific presence. That is available at any age and any income level. The question isn't whether your life is obituary-worthy. It is whether it is obituary-aligned.

Should I share what I wrote with anyone?

Most people shouldn't, at least not right away. The exercise loses half its power if you turn it into a performance for a spouse or a friend — the instinct to impress kicks in, and the draft hollows out. If you do share it later, share it with the people named in it, and share it for a reason, not as a grand gesture.

What if the gap between my obituary and my life is overwhelming?

It will feel that way for most people who do this honestly. Do not try to close the gap all at once. Pick the single smallest structural change that would shrink the gap by a measurable amount — one calendar rule, one weekly call, one phone-in-the-kitchen hour — and run it for thirty days. The overwhelm is what happens when you try to legislate a life by feeling instead of by structure. Small repeatable things move the line.