Embracing Death Life Through A Different Lens
Transcriber: Mai Hưng
Reviewer: 한솜 이
Theresa lived every day
the best she could.
She never knocked on wood.
She loved her family to pieces
Almost as much as she loved Reese`s.
When I was teaching business management
leadership at Central College in Pella,
Iowa, my students started
calling me Dr. Death.
Now, what does that have
to do with leadership?
I probably talked about death,
dying and grief too much.
I started a research project where I
interviewed more than one hundred of
the top thought leaders, experts, gurus
in the field of leadership.
These were people, authors, experts,
practitioners, professors,
people really at the top of the field.
And what I wanted to know is how
can I prepare my students to be
the best leaders possible.
Now, there were several
themes that emerged,
but one in particular was a big surprise,
and that was I should be teaching my
students about death, dying and grief.
Now, again, what does that have
to do with leadership?
Well, this was about 2007-2008
during the financial crisis. And they
explained to me that industries are dying,
companies are disappearing and jobs are
evaporating and people are experiencing
a lot of loss and a lot of grief. And all
of these losses are like many deaths.
Now, fast forward to the pandemic and
all of this is magnified again,
the industries are dying and
companies are disappearing
and people are losing jobs again.
We’re also experiencing physical death
when we were getting death counts daily
by country, by state by city.
And again, the research says that one out
of five of us have lost someone we
love to covid. So how do
I learn, you know,
what do I do with all this information?
Well, there is evidence that people
want to know about this.
These topics, such as on The New
York Times bestseller list,
the last couple of years, books such as
Being Mortal and When
Breath Becomes Air,
both of those written by doctors
about death and dying and
the quality of life at the end of life.
Then we have Joan Didion’s book,
A Year of Magical Thinking.
Joe, did Joan Didion, a well known writer,
it was also made into a Broadway play.
And that book is about the year after
her husband who died so suddenly
and how she was processing that grief.
I also discovered in my research Ellen
Goodman, former New York Times columnist,
she created a not for profit called The
Conversation Project when her parents
were dying. She realized that there really
she didn’t have any resources,
that she wanted to have conversations.
She didn’t know how to start it.
No one wanted to talk about it.
So therefore, she created this called The
Conversation Project, and on her website,
you can even download a conversation
starter for free.
I discovered Jon Underwood in the U.K. ,
he created what he calls death cafes,
and I encourage all of you to
Google death cafes, dotcom,
because now they’re all over the world.
They’re not a therapy group.
It’s not a support group, but it’s people
who gather just to learn about death
and dying and grief from each other. I’ve
even attended a death cafe in Des Moines.
Now, the past year, they’ve been on Zoome.
But as I said, they’re
all over the world.
She also loved
her cats, if only they didn’t lie
around like big furry mats,
one of her best friends was her mother.
Theresa loved her and would
never ask for another.
So most people don’t want
to talk about death.
They don’t even want to think about it.
How am I going to teach about it?
David Brooks in his book
A Road to Character,
he talks about resuming virtues versus
eulogy virtues. resume virtues
are those things that you
would put on a resume.
They focus on doing what have you done?
What have you accomplished?
What awards have you received?
What boards are you on?
Eulogy virtues are those things that
someone might talk about at your funeral
or a celebration of life? They
focus on being your character,
what kind of person you were.
So I want to teach my students
about eulogy virtues.
so one of the things that I did is
I have them read some of my favorite
eulogies. Now I have a collection.
I collect eulogies. I mean,
doesn’t everybody?
But again, I’m known as Dr. Death,
so I have a collection.
If I go to a funeral and I like the eulogy
I asked for a copy.
I also have students watch Tim Russert
memorial service. now Tim Russert was
the face of NBC’s Meet the Press
for years and he was beloved.
In fact, people described him
as we invited him into our
living room every Sunday
because he was that familiar with them.
Tim Russert died suddenly
in two thousand eight.
And at that time, NBC had four days of
coverage of remembering Tim Russert.
And over these four days, people were
talking about Tim, what Tim was like.
They mentioned something
about what he did,
but they were really talking about who Tim
was as a person, his eulogy virtues
What was he like?
What was his character?
And at the time, there was criticism like
who really gets four days of coverage
when they die on television? Unless
maybe you’re president?
But Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street
Journal wrote an article and said,
“I don’t think it’s excessive, young
people need role models.
And Tim Russert was beloved and he was a
perfect role model of a life well lived.”
I also have my students read the
book Tuesdays with Morrie.
Now, that’s a classic and professors love
that book because it’s based on
a true story where Mitch Albom discovers
that his favorite professor Morrie is
dying of ALS. So he goes to reconnect
and goes to talk with them.
And the conversation is so rich that
he decides to go back every Tuesday
and it becomes Tuesdays
with Morrie the book.
But their conversation, without
using the words resume virtues
and eulogy virtues, the conversation
really is all about life. moreas teaching
them about how to have a meaningful life.
They talk about death, dying,
They talk about marriage, love, success,
competition.
But in the end, it’s really
about the meaning of life,
and that’s really what I’m trying to
teach my students, not about death,
but about the meaning of life.
Teresa seemed to always be hungry when she
didn’t get fed, she would get cranky.
her favorite wine was edelweiss. She was
always a good person to go to for advice.
So in the process of teaching my students
about the meaning of life, Victor Frankl,
a Holocaust survivor and author of a
classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning,
talks about that the last freedom to
really be taken from us is our freedom of
choice, our attitude, how we
respond to a situation.
And so I’m trying to teach the students
that life is really about decisions
and decisions have consequences.
And all of these decisions and
consequences add up to be your life.
So I created a eulogy assignment and I
introduce it at the beginning of class.
But the students know they’re not going
to do it until the end of class.
And they’re really only two rules, one,
that it’s mandatory and two
that they know they know they’re
going to share it.
Now, I introduce it early, and when I do
introduce it, they’re like, I you know,
I understand this.
What’s the whole point?
But by the time we’ve done the eulogies
and the Tuesdays with Morrie,
they are connecting the dots.
And I relate it back to there’s a lot
of grief going on in the world
and particularly in the workplace.
And if leaders don’t understand
our own coping mechanisms,
how can we help others through these
kinds of stressful situations?
Again, I said there are no rules,
it’s just mandatory,
they have to share it because I want
to I want to create a sacred space.
a safe space for them to share
something so intimate.
There’s no right or wrong, no good
or bad. There’s no link.
There’s no word count.
it’s not a graded.
It’s very creative, it’s been very
meaningful, some put it to music,
some put it to poetry,
but it’s usually very
a touching and a very good exercise
One student came in and he had his guitar
and he started singing his eulogy to
the class. Another student,
she played basketball.
So she used basketball as her metaphor
And she talked about the four
quarters of her life and
the office that she had had along the way.
People had helped her and the
points that she had made.
Another student loved shoes. So she talked
about shoes. That was her lens.
And she talked about where she’d been,
where she was going and where
she had hoped to go.
But the one that really sticks in my mind
that I want to share with you is
It was a football player, probably two
hundred and forty pounds, six four.
The room was full and it Central College,
a classroom of 30 is full.
We were sitting in a big circle.
He stands up to give his eulogy and he
was so choked up he could not do it.
The student next to him leaned
over and said, you know,
are you OK if I would read this for you?
And he said, “that would be great.”
And she read it and you
could hear a pin drop.
I was so proud of the class, everybody
was so respectful,
but it was also a good example
of compassion and empathy
and those are also leadership skills
that I’m trying to teach.
Now, I have presented this research at
academic conferences over the years as
a research evolved and I always have
faculty members ask me now you do this
exercise with twenty to twenty two
year olds. How does that go over?
And my response is always it
goes over really well,
millennials are the purpose generation.
They want to live a life
of purpose and meaning
and I’m trying to help them find that.
And I also say the real purpose of
the exercise is if that’s how
they want to be remembered.
They need to start living their
life like that right now
and the sooner they understand that,
the better.
Teresa took a nap almost every day, but
she didn’t waste her life away.
She believed naps could cure anything,
or if they didn’t,
she would just dance and sing.
She stood up for what she believed in
and knew that who she was
came from within.
You’ve just been listening to
Theresa give her own eulogy.
That she wrote in my class
when she was twenty one,
now she’s thirty two and she
has three little kids.
So when I called her to ask if I could
share her eulogy with you, she said, Oh,
absolutely. And then when I
called her again to say,
would you actually record that so that I
can share your voice with my audience?
She said, Oh, sure. And she said,
you know, naps are still important.
And she said, we if we have a bad day,
we dance the day away.
Now, as I said, my students
call me Dr. Death.
I plan my funeral the way others
plan weddings and parties.
In fact, my husband has even said, “don’t
worry, it will be a nice funeral.
You can stop planning it. OK,”
but the whole idea is if we think about
how we want to be remembered,
I think it can be a daily guide
for how we live our life now.
I encourage all of you to think
about your eulogy virtues
and even go write your eulogy and share
it with someone and ask yourself,
is that how I’m living my life?
Am I living my life in a way that
I want to be remembered?
Because when we do when we embrace death,
we see life through a different lens.
Thank you.