Guy Noble

In praise of living eulogies

Instead of only celebrating people when they’re in a box, let’s regularly tell them we love them, says Guy Noble.

The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that there were two sets of virtues in life, the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. The resume virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral – whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful, whether you loved deeply.

This came to mind recently as I went to yet another funeral of someone who died way short of their biblical span. At the age of 49, opera singer Taryn Fiebig was in the extremely unlucky position of being able to plan her own...