Don't Save It for the Funeral: The Power of a Social Eulogy

**Chip Conley** (0:00)
I think sometimes, for some of us, we don't really spend the time to realize how important someone is.
For so many of us, you know, I've been dealing with mom's death, and you don't realize how valuable someone or something is until they're no longer there. So the funeral serves that purpose to reflect upon what life is like without that person.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
This is The Midlife Chrysalis. Welcome to Wisdom Wednesdays with Chip Conley and Derek Gehl.
Your weekly conversation about thriving in midlife. Together, we explore the questions, insights and practices that help you live this chapter with more purpose, vitality and joy.

**Derek Gehl** (0:40)
Welcome to another episode of Wisdom Wednesday here at The Midlife Chrysalis podcast. My name is Derek Gehl. I'm the CEO here at MEA, and I'm with our founder, Chip Conley. Chip, how are you doing?

**Chip Conley** (0:49)
Hey, great. Welcome to Midsummer.

**Derek Gehl** (0:52)
Midsummer.

**Chip Conley** (0:53)
Midsummer night's dream. I can't tell you that I know what that's all about, but Midsummer is a funny time.
We're not quite Midsummer if you look at the technicality of, probably early August would be Midsummer, but it's very interesting in the United States, I don't know if it's true in Canada, but kids are going back to school in sometimes the second or third week of August, like, wait a minute, they graduate in like May, and I don't know whatever happened there in terms of-

**Derek Gehl** (1:24)
How that happened, yeah.

**Chip Conley** (1:25)
Yeah, because some schools are very different. What's that?

**Derek Gehl** (1:29)
Was it Labor Day for you growing up? Like post-Labor Day, that's when you went back to school?

**Chip Conley** (1:33)
You know, it was actually even, yeah, it was like mid-September, it was post-Labor Day for sure. I don't know what happened.

**Derek Gehl** (1:39)
I don't know either. I don't know. Most of our schools in Canada are still post-Labor Day unless you get into the private schools and then they get kind of wacky. But I know the US is all over the place now.

**Chip Conley** (1:48)
It doesn't make sense.

**Derek Gehl** (1:49)
No, it doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't.

**Chip Conley** (1:50)
Okay. Well, what are we talking about?

**Derek Gehl** (1:53)
What are we talking? We're gonna talk about something that you've written about. And we touched on it briefly in a past episode, but it was part of a bigger episode. And that was kind of a living funeral, right? And so funerals are kind of a strange thing. We all wait till someone dies and then we say all these great things about them. We didn't tell them when they were actually, you know, still with us, right? And so, what pulled you towards this idea? And maybe frame it of, okay, what are you doing? And just to remind people, and then what drew you to this?

**Chip Conley** (2:22)
Yeah. So the language I used in a past episode was a social eulogy, which I think is new language in the lexicon of the world. But living funeral, which I found out later, is something that there's a whole movement around it. So these are two different things. So let me explain both. So a living funeral is often done for somebody who is going to die. Well, we're all going to die, but who's going to die in the next 60 to 90 days. They have a life-threatening situation. And instead of waiting to have everybody tell their stories to that person when they're in the ground, as I did recently with my mom with a memorial to her after she passed, you do it while they're still living. And they're still conscious. They're still, they still, I can understand it and hear it. So that's what a living funeral is. And more and more people are doing this. It's a, it's a sort of almost like a new rite of passage. And it really speaks to the idea that the formality of waiting till till someone dies to tell them how much you love them doesn't make a lot of sense.
Now, my framing of this is actually a little different than that. And I called it the social eulogy. And what I suggested there, especially around the fact that next February I go, I'm going to go off the grid and, you know, no one's going to be able to know how to get a hold of me for a month. I, the idea there was you have a dinner with a collection of people who know each other well and at the dinner you are prepared in advance to give a two to three minute eulogy of each of the other people who will be at the table with you. So let's say there's five people. So that means you have to write four eulogies for the other people who will be at the table. And at dinner, one at a time, each of us get to hear the eulogies. And it's perfectly fine for somebody to write it down and to read it at dinner because quite frankly, that's what often happens at a funeral. So yeah, it could be off the cuff and fun and humorous and all that. That's great and it doesn't require reading it. But I think to really take this seriously in a way that is profound and allows people to do a little bit of mental and emotional preparation in advance, writing it down and then actually giving the little talk at dinner to that person. And then each of the four people can say that to that person, and then that person who's now heard the eulogies from the four other people can say what that felt like. And then you go to the next person, and then you go to the next person. So I don't know that I've seen a formalized way of doing this. I absolutely will be doing it in February. I've started, I've done it in little ways with, like, I had a dinner recently where I just said to the other two people at dinner, I just wanted to tell you two how much I love you and here's why. But I did no preparation in advance. I just sort of said it and then we ended up doing that, but there was no preparation. But it felt really good because it's something we live in an era in which there's a lot of moral ugliness. But Dr. Keltner, UC Berkeley professor who teaches every December at our Baja campus of MEA, he says the number one pathway to feeling awe in life, or the most common pathway is to experience moral beauty.