At some point in our lives, we begin developing our résumés, those documented lists of accomplishments and accolades that we deemed noteworthy. Usually the purpose of these documents is to impress a prospective employer or the board of directors looking someone to take a higher place in the company. The résumé is the opportune way you promote yourself to others.
Somewhere else along life’s way, the necessity of résumés, along with life insurance, diminishes. How many of us needed a résumé in order to retire? Maybe that would be a good idea: utilizing our résumés to prove to some AARP committee that we are worthy of retirement and all of the benefits appertaining thereunto, including reasons why we deserve Social Security and Medicare.
Or supposing when you came to the very end of your life and you needed that résumé to justify your use of life itself, what would you want it to say, for Heaven’s sake? Would you list your membership in a church, along with your attendance and giving over the years? Maybe you’d have a section on your best golf score on the Sundays you weren’t able to make worship, or the size and number of fish you caught.
Of course, there ought to be a bottom line on which you could list your net worth — that wonderfully illusive figure for which you wrote all those résumés in the earlier days and for which you gave your time, talent and energy to produce. If money is not your thing, perhaps you could write an essay spelling out your major contributions to humankind and other reasons for which you ought to be remembered by family, friends and all acquaintances. A copy of this essay should be filed with your minister to be used at the funeral or memorial service so that family friends and acquaintances may be reminded of your extraordinary qualities. Finally, it’s grist for the obituary bearing your name.
Alfred Nobel had an explosive career and an impressive bottom line. He was worth a bundle for his invention of that powerful stuff we know as dynamite. Not wanting to be remembered as the man who invented the explosive that has caused as much harm as good, he took his powerful fortune and set up the Nobel Prize for Peace.
On December 10, 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would rise to that grand podium in Oslo to accept the accolade on behalf of the cause for which he so nobly gave the last full measure of his devotion. Within a few short years, the assassin would find his mark in Memphis that would change King’s legacy into the truest obituary we’ve ever known. When he accepted the honor in Norway, this is part of what he said: I think Alfred Nobel would know what I mean when I say that I accept this award in the spirit of a curator of some precious heirloom which he holds in trust for its true owners – all those to whom beauty is truth and truth beauty – and in whose eyes the beauty of genuine brotherhood and peace is more precious than diamonds or silver or gold.
When the dust settles on our graves, and the stones simply tell the dates of our birth and death with only a hyphen representing all our live-long days, our real obituary will be the unwritten legacy we leave by how we lived and loved, and honored all people.