The Uniqueness of Your Eulogy

Many people don’t think about creating their eulogy for the same reason that they have not written their autobiography—they regard their life as too ordinary, too insignificant, too pedestrian.

The author and essayist, F W Boreham, addressed this issue in the Introduction to his autobiography:

Let nobody imagine, for the thousandth part of a second, that my Autobiography is born of an inflated conception of my own importance. On the contrary, it is born of a delicious consciousness of my own insignificance. The lives of important people are seldom exciting: everybody knows the story before the biographer sets out to tell it. But the lives of the Nobodies and the Nonentities offer a virgin field of novelty and freshness…

The person whose biography [eulogy] is not worth writing has never yet been born…

I therefore venture. If I achieve nothing else, I shall at least have borne grateful and reverent witness to the goodness and mercy that have followed me all the days of my life, and to the sweetness and splendour of those companionships that have made a pilgrim track glow like a pathway of roses.

Geoff Pound

Excerpt source: F W Boreham, ‘Introduction,’ My Pilgrimage, An Autobiography London: The Epworth Press, 1940, 7-8.

Image: F W Boreham.