What If You Wrote the Eulogy While They Were Still Here?

Last month, my dad told me he wanted me to write his eulogy — while he was still alive.

It stopped me. We don’t really have those conversations in our culture. We don’t sit down with someone we love and say: “I want to make sure your story is told.” But he asked. And the more I sat with it, the more I understood — what a gift to be given the chance to do it while he can still hear it.

I haven’t written it yet. But I will.

That conversation is a big part of why my recent episode with Niki Weiss on the Digital Legacy Podcast hit so close to home.

The stories that make a person them

When you start to gather the memories, it’s always the small, specific ones that matter most.

My dad once bought oars for a boat he never had. Mark’s dad once bought a rototiller for a garden that didn’t exist. Those details — the ones that seem almost too ordinary to mention — are exactly what make a person them. No one else’s dad does that. That’s your person.

That’s what a living tribute captures. Not a polished summary of someone’s life. The real stuff.

What Niki brought to the conversation

Niki’s father died when she was 11.

She doesn’t have a eulogy. She doesn’t have letters or memories written down by people who knew him. She has what she remembers — and the quiet ache of everything she never got to know.

That reframed the whole conversation for me. A living tribute isn’t just a gift for the person being honored. It’s a gift for everyone who will one day miss them. The children. The grandchildren. The people who will want to know who this person really was — long after the people who knew them are gone too.

Niki now works in hospice. She’s sat with families at the hardest moments imaginable, and what she said stayed with me:

The two greatest gifts you can leave behind are a life lived without regrets — and the peace of mind that comes from knowing the people you love truly knew you.

A living tribute isn’t about death — it’s about love

We built TreulogyAI to help people write tributes after a loss. But this conversation reminded me of something important: you don’t have to wait.

A living tribute — writing about someone while they’re still here — is one of the most profound things you can do. It says: I see you. I know who you are. And I want you to hear it.

TreulogyAI can help with that too. The same guided questions that help you capture memories after a loss work just as beautifully when your person is still in the room with you.

Where do you start?

You don’t need to have the perfect words. You don’t need to be a writer. You just need a few stories — the specific, true ones that only you would know.

TreulogyAI will help you shape them into something worth keeping.

Thank you to Niki Weiss and the Digital Legacy Podcast for this conversation. If it resonated with you, I’d love to hear your story.