What will you be known for after you die? Your life is so much more than a resume. Will your legacy of kindness live on? Your grudges? Your struggle to forgive? Or will it be hating cold butter, loving salty chips and chive dip, and the time you saved a goat from drowning? The stories that live on are only the ones you dared to share, and the ones you told. Being known, and knowing others, might be the richest human experience there is. One that outlasts the physical, maybe even the spiritual. So why do so many of us hide our real self? Mary McGreevy runs Tips from Dead People, the account where she reads obituaries most of us would scroll past, and finds the ones that say something true. In this conversation, we talk about the value in exposing mistakes, leaving things messy, living our real true life. Mary walks through what she's learned about forgiveness from self-written obituaries, and we talk about the strange grief of a friendship that dies while both people are still alive, still out there, still not finding their way back to each other. In This Episode Being known and knowing may be the richest human experience there isThe stories that live on are the ones you dared to tell while you were hereSelf-written obituaries are often where the deepest forgiveness shows upA friendship can end, and still deserve its own honest reckoning, even while both people are alive to feel itAbout The Best Friend Podcast The Best Friend Podcast is where original friendship research meets real-life stories. Host Rachel Joy Swardson, founder of The Best Friend Project, investigates how women find, make, lose, and keep the platonic loves of their lives through original data, personal experience, and candid conversations. To learn more, visit The Best Friend Project.co . While you're there, discover your Friendship Archetype by taking the Friendship Survey We'd also love to stay in touch. Come say hello on Instagram and Facebook (we will follow you back!) If you need to reach us, you can always email us at Hello@TheBFProject.com. Connect with Mary McGreevy and @TipsFromDeadPeople on: Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok LinkedIn Chapters: 00:00 Mary's theory about honest stories 00:52 Welcome to The Best Friend Project 01:20 Meet Mary McGreevy of Tips from Dead People 02:20 The obituary that gave a best friend top billing 04:15 Why the bends in the road belong in the story 05:20 Scorched earth obituaries and the comments they get 06:45 Forgiveness in self-written obituaries 11:50 Bronnie Ware's regrets and the one nobody quotes 13:15 The little things that turn out to be the big things 16:20 What Mary's friends make of the work 20:40 How reading obituaries changed how she lives 24:10 Take that, LinkedIn: the herring factory woman 28:20 Rachel's grandma, the joke, and the empty funeral 31:20 Being the keeper of the stories 33:40 Tennyson took 17 years to write it 36:45 Can you write an obituary for a living friendship? 41:10 Tig Notaro and the end of a friendship 43:20 The loneliest grief nobody has a book for 47:50 The narratives we tell ourselves to keep going 48:40 Takeaway: let yourself be known 49:40 Where to find Mary 50:40 Rachel's reflection 53:00 Next week: friendship and menopause Support the show
