Jack couldn't hear the eulogies. Jack was dead.

Being in Cape Town again this February,  brings back memories of the man who was my role model for over forty-three years. My stepfather, then in his mid-eighties, often exclaimed 'Tell me now!' when he returned from yet another funeral. Friends and ex-colleagues, not always one and the same, were dropping around him like old pines. These events concerned him and, as he was a big influence in my life, I always valued what he had to say. On this occasion, he was talking about a man named Jack, who had died.

He told me that 'Jack was a lovely guy; married to the same woman for forty years. They raised three fine boys. He started his own business when he was twenty-three and he drove Buicks all his life – only the color changed. He ran the local food pantry for a quarter century and he was a scratch golfer. And when people visited, they’d usually find one to two strangers eating a meal in the kitchen’. My stepfather paused, shaking his head. ‘I didn't know Jack very well but I never knew he was such a good person. Hearing how much folks appreciated him, made me wonder if he knew that. Because I've a feeling nobody had the good sense to tell him when he was alive. They said some wonderful things about him but Jack couldn't hear the eulogies. Jack was dead’.

In our quotidian lives, we rarely take the time to tell someone how much we admire that individual as a person. Do we worry that it weakens the persona we project? A recent study of adults in the US, England and Russia revealed that people often feel at their most inauthentic in the presence of others. Why do some of us resist being who truly are? Offering genuine admiration for the completeness of a friend has somehow become a sign of unearned intimacy - not compatible with our insulated, headlong lives. And so we make careless judgments, unaware of the good deeds others do, or burdens these individuals carry elsewhere in their lives.

But we should pause. It can be surprising to discover what people do for others. If we accept Walt Whitman's idea that we 'contain multitudes', rather than seeing others as poor listeners, self-absorbed, or even fools we must suffer gladly, shouldn’t we look deeper? Shouldn't we – without being intrusive - make an effort to be aware that they, like all of us, 'contain multitudes'?

Such a philosophy is an obligation I believe we all have if we are to be truly human. It’s the African principle of ‘ubuntu’, as articulated by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He writes ‘I am human because I belong. I participate. I share. It’s an ecology of spirit’.

My stepfather got his wish. He had retired at sixty-five as chairman of Warner-Lambert South Africa. For the next twenty-five years, he supervised the pension fund of one of the country’s largest textile companies. When he turned ninety, he told the owner of the company that he felt he would like to, as he put it, ‘move on to something new’. So they gave him a huge party. Family, close friends, and colleagues from all the companies he had led, stepped forward to deliver wide-ranging eulogies. His response was simple: ‘Thanks, guys; and thanks especially for telling me now’.

He died serenely two years later. He had specifically directed that there be no eulogies. He wouldn't hear them. And, anyway, he knew what he had meant to us.