Finding True North

There is a particular kind of grief that catches people off guard. You sit with someone you love as they search, almost desperately, for the details of the person they just lost. The dates. The small stories. The things that made her mother exactly who she was.

The fog of loss makes it nearly impossible to hold onto specifics when every part of you is simply trying to hold on. In the first week, a family is asked to assemble a whole life out of a shoebox of photographs and a handful of half-remembered anecdotes, and to do it on a deadline.

Writing your own obituary removes that burden from the people who love you. It gives them your words, your story, your voice. Already written. That alone would make it worth doing. But it is not the main reason I ask the women I work with to try it.

This is not a morbid exercise

I want to say that plainly, because the first reaction most women have is a small recoil. We are taught to treat death as something to be managed by other people, later, out of sight. Writing about your own ending feels like tempting it.

It is the opposite. An obituary is the shortest honest biography a person ever gets. It has no room for the resume, the square footage, or the balance in the brokerage account. It has room for what you stood for, who you loved, what you made, and how it felt to be near you. When you write yours in advance, you are not rehearsing your death. You are stating, in writing, what you think your life is for.

It may bring things up. That is not a warning. It is a sign you are doing it honestly. The women who find this hardest are usually the ones who have spent decades writing everyone else's story, as daughter, wife, mother, caregiver, employee, and have not been asked in a very long time what they want their own to say.

Seven sections of a life

You do not need a template, but it helps to know the shape. Most obituaries, and most lives, can be told in seven movements.

Identity. Who you were, in the plainest terms. Where you came from, what you were called by the people who loved you, and what you would want a stranger to understand about you in the first two sentences.

Character. Not your achievements. Your qualities. What people could count on from you. What you refused to do. The thing your friends would say about you when you were not in the room.

Work. What you built, paid or unpaid. The caregiving counts. The years of keeping a household running on one income count. The business, the classroom, the garden, the committee nobody else would chair.

Love. Who you loved and how. The relationships that shaped you, including the ones that ended. The people who will carry you forward.

Joy. What delighted you. This section is almost always too short in a first draft, and the reason is usually worth noticing.

Legacy. What you hope outlasts you. Not only money, though money is part of it. The values, the habits, the stories, the places, the causes.

Closing. How you would want to be remembered, in one or two lines. If you could choose the last sentence, what would it be?

Write badly at first. Write in fragments. Nobody is grading this, and you can return to it as many times as you like. Most women find that the second draft, written a few weeks after the first, is the one that tells the truth.

The compass alignment

Here is the part that belongs on a financial planning website, and the reason I give this exercise to clients who came to me about money.

Once the draft exists, read it next to your actual life. Your calendar. Your bank statements. The last twelve months of where your time and your money actually went. Then ask the uncomfortable question: does the way I am living support the story I just wrote, or contradict it?

A woman who writes that she was generous to a fault and discovers she has not given herself a single unhurried day in three years has learned something. A woman who writes that family was everything and realizes her estate documents have not been updated since a marriage that ended a decade ago has learned something. A woman who writes about freedom and adventure and finds her money is entirely committed to maintaining a house she no longer wants has learned something too.

None of these discoveries require a dramatic response. They require attention. Usually the adjustment is small: a beneficiary form, a line in the budget with your own name on it, a conversation you have been postponing, a decision to stop funding a version of your life that ended a while ago. The obituary does not tell you what to do. It tells you what you already believe, so that your choices can catch up.

A living document

Keep it somewhere you will see it. Read it once a year, on a date that means something to you, and revise it when it no longer sounds like you. Give a copy to the person who would be asked to write it, and tell them it is there. That is an act of love toward them, and a quiet act of authorship over your own life.

Work through it at whatever pace is right for you. There is no deadline on this one, which is exactly the point.

Going further

Two ways to take this deeper

What you have just read is the short form. The seven sections above will get you to an honest first draft. For women who want to turn that draft into something more complete, and for groups who want to work through it together, there are two ways I support the process.

If this spoke to you

I write letters like this one a few times a month for At the Threshold, a free newsletter for women navigating the financial side of a life in transition. No urgency, no selling, just the thinking I would share with a friend across the table. You are welcome to join.

If you would rather talk than read, you can schedule a conversation, or start with the Threshold Readiness Assessment to see where you stand before you decide anything.

Teresa McAlpine, CDFA, BFA, is a Behavioral Financial Advisor trained in financial trauma and financial therapy, based in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She works with women navigating divorce, widowhood, caregiving, and disruption through Threshold Compass Strategies.