Though he was a primary school principal whose career was spent in Southland and Canterbury, his former pupils and colleagues are everywhere.

"He was a nice man," they would always tell me, "a good man." He really was.

Forgive me if everybody feels this way about their father but I cannot shake a conviction that my brothers and sisters and I were exceptionally and undeservedly lucky.

As the oldest I've often worried how I could possibly do justice to his qualities when it came to his funeral. The worry became more urgent late last year when, aged 89, he began to go downhill and went into care.

He lingered until Thursday of last week. My siblings in Christchurch were called to the rest home in the early hours.

His breathing had become laboured and he could barely speak but his eyes had lit up briefly at my arrival from Auckland.

Between us, we never left his bedside until almost 8pm when we went to a nearby room for a bite to eat. That is when he let go. We were gone barely a minute when a nurse summoned us.

I don't know whether someone in the terminal stage of congestive heart failure can make the decision to let go but if so, it would be typical of him to wait until he was alone. He would be thinking of us, sparing us the alarm of his last gasp.

Considerate is the word that comes closest to describing him. He was considerate not just in the thoughtful way of anticipating other people's ordinary needs and wishes, which he did constantly. He was considerate in conversation.

Like most people of the generation that grew up without television he knew how to make conversation, and when you were with him he was not comfortable unless there was conversation. For him the art came naturally.

He was interested in everything you thought and everything you were doing. He was not interested in talking about himself. Continue reading

• John Roughan is an editorial writer and columnist for the New Zealand Herald.

You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.

When I meet such a person it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often have a sadder thought: It occurs to me that I've achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.

A few years ago I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those people. I realized that if I wanted to do that I was going to have to work harder to save my own soul.

I was going to have to have the sort of moral adventures that produce that kind of goodness. I was going to have to be better at balancing my life.

It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones.

But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light.

Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character. Continue reading

• David Brooks in The New York Times

David Brooks is an Op-Ed columnist and the author, most recently, of "The Road to Character," from which this essay is adapted.