Finding Meaning in Loss
Photo by Cosmin Gurau on Unsplash.
At the end of 2021, I sat down to write the eulogy I’d want at my funeral in three years’ time. It was a confronting experience. If I died at 38, I wouldn’t see our son grow up. I’d leave my husband a single father. I’d never do all the things I dreamed of, or make the impact I wanted to have.
After I finished the exercise, I checked my phone. A friend had texted me. “Have you heard the news about Pete?” One of our friends had just died. I’d met him just three years beforehand. He’d been 37.
The eulogy exercise, from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is effective because it focuses our thoughts on who we want to have been to the people around us. How do we want to be remembered? What did we stand for? How did we make people feel? From that perspective, we can reflect on whether our lives are currently reflecting those values, and make tweaks as needed.
There’s a beauty to contemplating the eulogy of my elderly self’s funeral. It gives me the comfort of many more decades in which to become the person I want to be: a long life in which to create and contribute all the things of which I dream.
Of course, this is a false comfort. None of us knows when we might only, in fact, have three years left. Or three months. Or even three minutes. Pete’s death shook me because it reminded me of this truth we so easily forget. My eulogy exercise suddenly felt very close to home.
Pete’s absence has felt especially poignant this summer, because I’ve been coaching again at the Journey — where we first met.
The Journey is the world’s biggest climate innovation summer school for graduates and young professionals. It’s run by Climate-KIC, part of the EU.
For the last decade, it’s been a full-time, month-long residential programme across different European locations. In each Journey, two coaches lead a group of forty young people from around the world, helping them to think creatively about combatting climate change through innovation.
In 2018, Pete and I headed up ‘Journey 2’: a group of forty passionate, fun-loving, razor-sharp, deeply caring participants. Over the course of three weeks, we became like family.
We became known as Uncle Pete and Aunt Megan. Together, we were the ‘dream team’ I’d longed for in my career, but had never thought I’d be lucky enough to get.
Back in summer 2018, in Cyprus and Bulgaria, Pete and I spent long evenings planning the next days’ sessions over dinner and wine; celebrating with participants after hours; and creating a structure during the day that supported them to thrive and be stretched. The days were long, intense, challenging, and full of fun.
To me, Pete was a magician.
He’d coached The Journey three times already, and could have done it backwards and blindfolded. He was playful, effervescent, creative, ridiculously goofy, and brilliantly intelligent. He won our participants’ love as well as their respect.
Pete remains the most skilled facilitator I’ve ever had the chance to work alongside, and one of the biggest inspirations in my career. The Journey was everything he stood for: education, possibility, creativity, leadership, entrepreneurship, climate change, multiculturalism, fun, rigour. I think he was the secret godfather of the programme.
Losing Pete three weeks before The Journey made it impossible for me to run from my grief. His presence was inseparable from the programme.
Most days, I longed to message him: ‘hey — remember when we did this?!’ We had so many in-jokes I wanted to revisit, that nobody else would get. I listened to all of our What’s App audio messages on repeat so that I could keep hearing his voice. And so The Journey this year was in part about working to remedy climate change and inspire future leaders. And in part, it was a deeply personal pilgrimage of sadness.
Pete’s death has led me to reflect a lot:
To be alive is truly wondrous.
After this blog post, I’m going to leave my house and go for a run, and I’m going to feel the ache in my legs and the breath in my lungs and know, without a doubt, that I am here. I’ll get to hug my toddler close before bed and read him stories. I get to use my talents in ways that feel meaningful. I get to look at the beauty of the vast skies and drink it in. Life is a gift. Savouring our own experience honours those we’ve lost.
There is great comfort in grieving in community.
A couple of weeks after Pete died, a friend and I held an online memorial for him, together with students we’d coached together. We lit candles, read poems and sang, and regaled each other with our favourite memories of him. We laughed a lot. It was deeply healing.
Grief (like all emotions) can’t be compartmentalised.
After the memorial, I wanted closure on my grief. I tried to separate out my personal grieving self, and my professional coach self that was prepping for The Journey and wanted to be all efficient and productive. I wasn’t able to do this. They remained intertwined, and it felt messy and unpredictable, and inconvenient. The more that I fought this, the harder it was.
Our hearts know what we need, if we quiet down enough to listen to them.
I was expecting myself to power through The Journey like some kind of coaching tank. “After all, I’m a professional! I’ve got a job to do!” In reality, I was depleted and sad and enraged at the injustice, and struggling with my lack of motivation. I realised that I needed to give myself permission to both give this programme my all and for that ‘all’ to feel different than normal. For a driven, excellence-oriented human, this permission was a game-changer.
Sharing vulnerability deepens our leadership.
At the end of The Journey 2021, I shared Pete’s story, and my grief, with our current students. Far from alienating us, it built trust. In fact, I wasn’t the only one going through something personal. Students were also grieving relatives and relationships, struggling with personal situations, and mental health. It normalised our struggles and brought us together.
But perhaps most importantly: it’s reminded me not to underestimate what we can create with our lives.
I can only imagine what Pete would have done had he lived many more years. And yet he made huge ripples in just four decades on earth. Most of our legacy is not in what we do, but in we who are. As Maya Angelou reminds us:
'I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’
Pete inspired people all over the world to see more possibilities than they began with. He injected serious playfulness into weighty subjects like climate change, precisely in order to liberate ideas and leadership. His energy, wonder, and playfulness created containers for magic to be created — magic that’s still casting spells today. He sparkled.
Who knows whether Pete had the chance to think about the legacy he’d leave at forty? And yet a legacy it truly is. What a gift to those of us he touched. As I return to my own eulogy for 2024, it’s a reminder that we can still leave great ripples in the world — even if we don’t end up having as long as we’d hoped.
Something to chew on: How do you tend to relate to grief? What is grief asking of you?