Most men I know have done the legal work. The will is drawn, the trust is funded, the beneficiaries are named. The attorney has been paid and the documents are filed somewhere safe. That part is handled.
What most men have not done — what I had not fully done until I sat down to write this — is think carefully about the spiritual texture of their departure. Not the paperwork. The actual leaving. What it looks like, what it sounds like, what it says about who you were and what you believed.
Bonnie and I have talked about it in practical terms. We both prefer cremation. We’ve made that clear to our children. The estate is in order. But the question of what I want the room to feel like when I am gone — what music, what words, what quality of honesty — that I had left largely unexamined.
Writing this article is the beginning of my answer to that question. And I suspect, if you are honest with yourself, you may have left the same question largely unexamined too.
The Scaffolding Is Not the Structure
There is a tendency among men of our generation to confuse the legal and financial preparation for death with the spiritual preparation. We get the trust in place and feel, somewhere underneath the surface, that the matter is essentially handled. It is not.
The trust distributes your assets. It says nothing about your soul. It does not tell your children what you believed, or what you regret, or what sustained you through the hard years. It does not carry your voice into the room after you leave it.
Researchers who study end-of-life experience in older men consistently find the same pattern: the men who approach death with the least anxiety are not the ones with the most comprehensive estate plans. They are the ones who have done what psychologist Erik Erikson called the work of integrity — the hard, quiet reckoning with a life lived, its failures acknowledged, its gifts counted, its meaning settled.
Integrity, in Erikson’s framework, is not about being blameless. It is about being honest. It is the ability to look back at the full arc of your life — the strong points and the weak ones, the moments of courage and the moments of smallness — and say: this was mine. I own it. I am at peace with it.
The alternative, he warned, is despair — the corrosive sense that time has run out before you could fix what was broken or become who you meant to be. That is a hard way to finish.
The Faith and Fulfillment resources at The Encore Project are built around the conviction that this spiritual work is not optional at this stage of life. It is the work. And it is available to every man willing to sit with it honestly.
The trust distributes your assets. It says nothing about your soul.
What I Want the Room to Feel Like
When I think about my own departure — the service, the atmosphere, the quality of what is left behind — the word that comes to me first is dignity. Not grandeur. Not performance. Dignity.
I want people to know that I understood something about myself: that I fell short, in many ways, of my own standards for good living. I had my strong points and my weak ones. I made mistakes I regret and choices I would make again without hesitation. I want the room to hold that complexity honestly, without the sanitizing that funerals often impose on a man’s actual life.
I want humility in the room. Not self-flagellation — just the honest acknowledgment that I was a human being doing his best with what he had, and that his best was sometimes not good enough, and that he knew it. I cherish my memories, both good and bad. I am grateful for my opportunities and my relationships. I want that gratitude to be in the room too.
And I want chant. Gregorian chant, specifically — those ancient voices rising in Latin from centuries before my birth, carrying a weight and a gravity that modern music rarely achieves. I have always been drawn to it. There is something in chant that says what I cannot say in my own words: that I am small, that God is large, and that the distance between those two facts is exactly where faith lives.
These are not elaborate requests. They require only that I say them out loud — to Bonnie, to my children, to whoever will be in that room — so that the people who love me know what I want and can give it to me.
That is the first act of making your departure your own: saying what you want before you can no longer say it.
The Faith I Actually Have
I am a Catholic — but not by birth or family habit. I chose it, deliberately, at the age of 18.
My parents were not Catholic and did not attend regular services. My extended family on my mother’s side were Catholic, so the faith was not entirely foreign to me. But the choosing was my own.
It happened, as the most important things often do, in an entirely ordinary way. I was 18 years old, in downtown Tulsa, picking up a pair of altered slacks from a men’s clothing store. On my way out, I walked past a Catholic information center next door. I saw some Catholic memorabilia in the window. I thought of my mother’s family. I wandered in to see what it was all about.
A priest gave me a copy of Life in Christ — a catechism. I took it home and read it. It made sense to me. All of it. I began taking instructions and came into the Church as a high school senior.
That is how it happened. A pair of slacks, a window display, a wandering in. I have always thought there was something right about that — that God found me not in a moment of crisis or dramatic seeking, but on an ordinary afternoon between a men’s clothing store and a sidewalk in Tulsa.
The Augustinian dimension of my faith came later, through Bonnie. She has worked at Cascia Hall — a Catholic Augustinian preparatory school here in Tulsa — for more than thirty years. It has been far more than a place of employment. It has been a family, a community, the living center of our spiritual life together. The Augustinian core values — truth, unity, and love — have become the air we breathe. And of the three, love is what it is finally about for me. Love is, as someone wiser than me once suggested, all you need.
Have I had doubts? Many. The young man who sat alone in a non-denominational hospital chapel in 1970, praying for a miracle that did not come, was not a man whose faith was untested. And the decades since have brought their own tests — losses, disappointments, the slow erosion of certainty that comes with simply paying attention to the world.
But I keep coming back to the same place. If I do not believe in the Catholic Christian values that have held me for more than sixty years — if I abandon this framework that has carried me through everything — what shall I believe instead? I have looked at the alternatives. None of them hold together as well for me. None of them account for the full weight of human experience, the reality of suffering, the necessity of mercy, the stubborn persistence of hope.
I believe in heaven and hell. I believe in a God who is not merely just but merciful — who accepts a complicated man for who he actually is rather than who he meant to be. I believe that mercy is large enough to hold my failures alongside my intentions. That is not wishful thinking. That is the core of what I understand Christianity to mean.
I want to be clear about something: I do not consider my path the right one for everyone. I respect all sincere spiritual traditions and condemn no one for the beliefs they hold. What I am describing is the path that has worked for me — the framework that has held, the mercy I have trusted, the love I have tried to live by. Your path may look different. What matters is that you have one, and that you have examined it honestly.
For men wrestling with their own faith in this chapter — whether it has deepened, or frayed, or simply grown more complicated than it once was — our Faith and Fulfillment section offers honest conversation about what it means to believe, or to doubt, or to search, at this stage of life. And the Coping with Grief & Loss category addresses the intersection of faith and mortality that so many men navigate alone.
The Slow Accumulation
Someone asked me recently how my faith had changed over the decades — whether there was a moment when it deepened rather than broke, a turning point I could name.
The honest answer is no. There was no single moment. No crisis resolved in a flash of clarity. What there was, instead, was the slow accumulation of a life lived inside a faith. Sunday after Sunday at Mass. Prayer in the ordinary moments as much as the desperate ones. The gradual discovery that the framework held — not because it was proved, but because it worked. Because it made sense of things that nothing else made sense of. Because it offered mercy when I needed it most, which was often.
Cascia Hall has been part of that accumulation. The Augustinian community around Bonnie and me — the priests, the colleagues, the families, the students who have passed through that school over thirty years — has given our faith a home and a face. It has made the abstract concrete. It has made love, in Augustine’s sense, something we could actually see and practice and be held accountable to.
That is my story, and I am sticking to it.
That is my story, and I am sticking to it.
I think many men of our generation have a version of that story. A faith that was not chosen in a single dramatic moment but accumulated over decades, tested and weathered and still standing. A faith that has room for doubt because it has been honest enough to earn it. A faith that does not need to be loud because it runs too deep for noise.
Making your departure your own does not require that you have everything figured out. It requires only that you show up at the end as yourself — with your particular faith, your specific regrets, your honest gratitude, your chosen music — and let the people who love you witness it.
That is enough. That is, in fact, everything.
