THE OBITUARY THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

---

"As for the rest of us left behind, I hope this is the beginning of a time of healing and learning to be a family again. There will be no service, no prayers and no closure for the family she spent a lifetime tearing apart. We cannot come together in the end to see to it that her grandchildren and great grandchildren can say their goodbyes. So I say here for all of us, GOOD BYE, MOM."

This was the last paragraph of the obituary of Dolores Aguillar, published in the Vallejo Times Herald  on August 17th - 18th, 2008.

Many of you may have read something like this on Facebook recently. It was floating around in a story about a woman in Florida that had died early last year. That obituary itself was plagiarized from the one above...which is true. It shocked me because I had never read anything quite like like it (except for the story I'll share in a minute). Unlike others that we might read today, the traditional platitudes to kindness or love do not exist in this obituary. This daughter writes that her mother "made no contribution to society and rarely shared a kind word or deed in her life." Painful, isn't it? She's sharing too much. Yet when I ask myself why, I easily understand that Mrs. Aguillar was a poor human being and her daughter merely provides an honest description of her mother's life. What makes this unusual is its truthfulness. As we know, the truth of one's life is not often found in an obituary.

Out of kindness.

I sometimes wonder if that is good for us. At one's death, does our avoidance in recognizing some of the mistakes made in the lives of those now dead make it too easy for the living to be less than we can be? Less than we should be?

Think about it. If we knew that more of the truths of our lives would be written and spoken at our deaths, would the living work to be better? To be more? 

Yes, I believe we would.

I know of only one man in history who was given a chance to read his own obituary before he died. What he did as a result of that experience changed the world. Here is his story....

Read More