May 27, 2025
THE AFTER PARTY
“It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé 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. Were you capable of deep love?” (David Brooks The Moral Bucket List)
While I explored other topics for this blog, I found I couldn’t concentrate for having just attended a celebration of life for the kind of friend whose eulogy virtues shone more brightly than his résumé virtues. At least at first glance. Which is not to say he was a saint. I wish he’d been there to hear the choice comments made by longtime friends who turned what could’ve been a somber occasion into a roast as much as a wake. Our first hint was a sign at the highway turnoff to his rural driveway, where big blue balloons adorned a sign indicating “Mark’s After Party”.
Along with a broader picture of the person we’d only known in a particular context, my takeaway was a profound appreciation for what Brooks calls the eulogy virtues. Here, clearly, was a person whose priorities were well and truly in order: family first, friends —especially those in need — second, strangers-who-became-friends, third, then everyone and everything else. Maybe lastly, for good or ill, himself.
Swami Radha puts great emphasis on the kind of selflessness that characterizes our friend, though he would never see himself from such a yogic perspective:
“THE GOAL OF YOGA is to achieve true union with the Light – knowing that the Light is within, and acting on that knowing. My Guru, Swami Sivananda, used to say that selfless service was the way to achieve this. “Selfless service will make you divine,” he would often say. He would tell people to concentrate on that instead of intellectualizing about concepts like liberation, the Absolute, or atman. The Bhagavad Gita says the same thing too, over and over – selfless service is the way to the Divine.”
While the Eastern teachings extol the virtue of humility and selflessness, I’m pretty sure that’s not the message most of us got in the West. Here, the emphasis has been on “résumé success, with the eulogy virtues being a byproduct at best. Brooks’ makes this observation:
“But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.”
For me, the goal of selflessness is less lofty, and could even be considered self-serving. It is the experience of freeing myself, however temporarily, from my maniacal roommate, the ego or devil on my shoulder who demands I be and do more that looks like the “desired” model of success than what my actual self represents. Attending my friend’s celebration, I was encouraged to see how my values aligned with those of the recently deceased, and what that had meant to other people. It gave me a sense of how satisfying it must have felt for him to suspend self-interest in the service of family and friends, and even strangers in need who became part of his extended family. Speech after speech revealed what a stellar human being he had been, showing how capable he was, despite some seemingly “unenlightened” qualities, of loving and being loved.
Surely that is successful enough for anyone.