“…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” — George Eliot, Middlemarch
The service was almost over when a man from his team stood up and said the thing the whole room was thinking. “I sat twelve feet from him for eleven years. I didn’t know he built boats.” Then his sister spoke. Then a neighbor. Then a woman none of us recognized, who said he’d driven her to chemotherapy every Tuesday for a winter. By the end, a whole person was standing in that room, assembled out of pieces none of us had ever held at the same time.
We say we lose people too soon, and that’s true. But the loss I keep returning to is older than the death. Eleven years of standing next to a fraction of a man and calling it knowing him. Why does it take a funeral to see someone whole? I’ve come to think there are two reasons, and neither is that we’re ungrateful or insensitive.
Why It Takes a Funeral
The first is that praise, while someone is alive, costs something. Say the true thing to a living colleague, and it can sound like you want something, a favor, a promotion, a glowing review. Death removes the transaction. At a memorial, nothing can be asked in return, so we finally say what we always knew. We aren’t more honest at funerals. We’re just, for once, not negotiating.
I wrote once about the leadership skill of tolerating uncertainty, the discipline to wait long enough for a situation to reveal what it actually is instead of reaching for the fast verdict. Seeing a whole person takes the same discipline. We reach for reliable or high-performing because it is faster than sitting with the parts of someone that never resolve into a résumé line.
The second reason is harder to face. Our organizations have no vocabulary for the whole person. We have résumé words: reliable, high-performing, cross-functional. The eulogy words, the ones about who someone was when no one was measuring, have no place to be spoken at work. So, they wait. And what waits gets said at exits: the retirement toast, the farewell email that makes everyone cry, the service. We speak to the whole person only when they are leaving.
The Hidden Capacities
That’s the part I can’t put down. The boats, the Tuesday drives, and the patience with someone else’s fear those weren’t hobbies, and they weren’t extras. They were hidden capacities. The man who could sit with a frightened stranger every week for a winter could have sat with a frightened team. Nobody asked.
Marco Argenti, the technologist, uses an analogy I keep coming back to. An expert horse rider learning to drive a car does not need ten percent of their old skills preserved. They need to trust their reflexes and instincts in an entirely new form. Organizations are asking the same question backward, hunting for the ten percent of a person’s résumé that survives disruption, when the actual asset was never on the résumé at all.
A culture rewards a narrow fragment of each person and quietly tells the rest to wait at the door, and the fragment that produces results is the one we manage, promote, and review. The remainder surfaces at the funeral, where everyone nods and says, “I didn’t know that,” and the organization has already spent a decade not using it.
I have my own version of this. Years ago, in a company I’ve long since left, there was a woman on my team who ran our operations with the steadiness of someone holding a door open for everyone else to walk through. I knew, vaguely, that she sang. It wasn’t until her farewell lunch, when a colleague pulled up a video of her in a choir at a cathedral, that the whole room went quiet, and I understood who I had been standing next to. I’d had six years to ask her one question about it. I asked it on the last day.
Aleksandra Sherman and Clair Morrissey, who study why the arts matter to human identity, would say I had it backward. Her singing was not a hobby adjacent to who she was. It was evidence of who she was, the same faculty of feeling and expression she brought quietly to how she ran a room for six years.
So, the question I started with, how do we remember people sooner, turns out to be the wrong question. Remembering is still a form of looking back. The real question is how we see someone whole before anything has ended.
The Sentence You’ve Been Saving
In 1997, accepting a lifetime achievement award, Fred Rogers asked a room full of television stars to take ten seconds of silence and think of the people who had helped them become who they are. The cameras caught the faces, and nobody was performing. It’s worth doing right now, before you scroll on. Ten seconds. Who came to mind?
Now the step Fred didn’t ask for. Somewhere in those ten seconds is a sentence you’ve been saving, and it usually begins with “What I’ve never told you.” It’s the eulogy sentence, the one you’d say if you were standing up at the end. Say it this week, to a face that can still hear it. Not a thank-you, because a thank-you is still a transaction. Say the thing you’d say if there were nothing left to ask.
And if you lead people, take it one step further. At your next one-on-one, ask a question that has nothing to do with the work, what they make, what they carry, or what they do that no one at work knows about. Then, listen to the way the room listened at that service. You’ll be surprised how much of the person was there the whole time, waiting to be asked.
Someone near you is living a hidden life faithfully right now. You know who. Don’t wait for the room to fill with people saying, “I didn’t know that.” Be the one who knew and said so while it could still be heard.
If this resonated with you and you’re thinking about what it might look like to bring more of this into your work, I’d invite you to stay connected.
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