18 Jul It Is Better to Go to a Funeral
On Saturday I attended a celebration of life for my friend and colleague Brian Finlay, CEO of the Stimson Center.
There’s a line in Ecclesiastes I’ve carried with me for years: it is better to go to a funeral than to a party. It doesn’t say a funeral is more fun. It doesn’t say it’s more pleasant. Only that it’s better.
I’ve come to understand why. A party lets us forget, for a while, that life is short. A funeral won’t let us. It sits us down and asks a question we spend most of our lives avoiding: whatever you wanted to do, whoever you wanted to be — this is the moment. Not someday. Now.
At the service, my friend Julian shared something Brian told him in his final days: “Looking back, I would not have done it differently.”
That stopped me. Not because it’s a tidy sentiment for a eulogy — those are easy to come by — but because of the question underneath it. Could each of us say that? Not about the past, the past can’t be changed. About right now. About this exact stretch of life we’re in, while change is still possible, while the pen is still in our hand.
I’ve noticed something else, too, the older I get and the more of these services I attend. What people actually remember about us — the ones we loved, the ones we worked beside, the ones we only briefly crossed paths with — is almost never our accomplishments. It’s not the titles, the deals closed, the awards on the shelf. It’s how we made them feel. Whether we were generous with our attention. Whether we saw them. Whether we made room for them in a life that was, for all of us, busy and short.
This is what I mean when I talk about legacy in my keynote What Will They Remember? Choosing Your Legacy by Design, Not Accident. Legacy isn’t something that gets assembled at the end, out of the achievements we’ve stacked up. It’s being written every single day, by default or by design, whether we’re paying attention to it or not. Brian had every reason to be remembered only for his accomplishments — decades of serious work on nuclear security and international peace, a career most would call significant by any external measure. And yet what filled the room on Saturday wasn’t a recitation of his résumé. It was story after story about how he made people feel — heard, valued, taken seriously, cared for. That was his legacy. Not the one his title would have predicted. The one he chose, in a thousand small moments, on purpose.
Most of us never choose our legacy deliberately. We back into it — busy, reactive, assuming there will be time later to be more present, more generous, more intentional about how we show up. Brian’s death, and the words he left with Julian, are a reminder that “later” is not a plan. It’s a hope.
I’m 68. I go to more funerals now than I used to — that’s simply the arithmetic of getting older, of having lived long enough to build a wide circle of people I love. And more and more, I try to hold onto those words from Ecclesiastes — not as something morbid, but as something clarifying. A reminder that the trail we leave behind isn’t written at the end. It’s being written today, in the ordinary, unremarkable moments of how we show up for the people in front of us — a phone call returned, a hard truth told with kindness, a few minutes of full attention we could easily have withheld.
If you’re reading this, I hope it does what these moments do for me: not a call to grand gestures, but a nudge toward the small ones, starting today. And if the question of what you want your legacy to be — at work, at home, in the time you have left — is one you’d like to explore further, either for yourself or for your organization, it’s a conversation I’d welcome.
Rest well, Brian. Thank you for the reminder.
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