What I should have said in my father’s eulogy
Most eulogies tell the story of a life and paint a portrait through anecdotes. But there’s another kind of story that can also be told: the most powerful moments you shared with the person who’s gone. I wish I’d talked about those kinds of memories at my father’s funeral.
The night my stepmother called to tell me that he’d died, I stayed up until 1:30 a.m. and wrote a eulogy in one sitting. He’d had a severe stroke six years before; I’d had plenty of time to prepare myself. Now that the end had come, telling his story was almost comforting: from his impoverished childhood in Brooklyn during the Depression to getting shot in Italy during the war, to his discontented years at the post office and his stormy marriage to my mother, to her early death and his two subsequent marriages, and finally to his happy-at-last retirement in Florida. To me, his life — 1922 to 2004 — seemed an everyman’s epic.
Though I left out the part about my parents’ harrowing fights, I tried to give a true portrait, including the quirks that defined him for those who knew him best. (He always worried that the worst possible disaster was on the way. He feared all dogs, large and small, and any water above his ankles. Seated at a long table, he would mutter insults about some guy at the other end: Look at that schmuck.)
I went back to that eulogy a few years ago, while researching a novel. (In my book, a son discovers, just hours after telling the story of his father’s life at his funeral, that his father spent three years in prison.) As eulogies go, it seemed pretty good. It covered a lot of ground: how he worried constantly, and the traumas that made him such a worrier; how important financial security was to him, because he’d gone hungry in childhood; how happy it made him, when he could no longer walk, to have my children sit in his recliner with him, snuggled against him, reading to him and drawing pictures.
But there was something else I could have shared, something that would have made the eulogy much more powerful: the most emotional memories of our time together. The elation, the grief, the anger. I’m talking about moments like these:
When I was very small, my mother would make me wait until 10 a.m. to wake him on weekend mornings,
because he worked until midnight.
When she gave me the OK, I’d run in and leap onto the bed. He would be lying on his back in just his boxer shorts, and he’d bend his knee so I could slide down his thigh to his belly. He would still be groggy, but smiling.
As soon as I was old enough to catch a baseball, we would cross the street every Saturday afternoon and practice on the field where I would eventually play Little League. First he pitched to me, then he hit to me — fly balls, line drives, grounders. I raced around catching balls, happy as a puppy. With his coaching, I became a good fielder. But I was afraid of fast grounders, which always seemed to hit a pebble at the last instant and come flying at my face. He hit those grounders harder as I got older, and lost patience with my ducking. “What are you, ball shy?” he’d snarl. I got angrier and angrier. After our practices, I would walk home 10 yards in front of him, furious.
One night when I was 13, he came into my room and lay down beside me in my bed. He told me that he and my mother had decided to separate. I already knew, because I’d overheard her phone calls. I threw my arm across his chest and said, “I love you.”
They divorced, but remarried two years later. Then, during my junior year in college, the phone rang at 7:30 one morning. He said I had to come straight home because my mother was sick. When I arrived, many hours later, he rushed to the door and said, “She’s gone.” (He hadn’t wanted me to spend all
that travel time alone, knowing she was dead.) He wept in my arms — the only time I’d ever seen him cry — and said, “I did everything wrong.”
After one of our last visits, he sat in his wheelchair in front of his home as we loaded our bags into the rental car. His health aide stood beside him. There were tears in his eyes. His health aide comforted him, saying, “You have a nice family, Joe.” I understood those tears, I thought. With his son and grandchildren close, he’d felt joy; once we left, he would go back to a much narrower existence.
I’m sharing all this as a suggestion. If you find yourself preparing a eulogy — if your grief will allow it — consider including the stories that mean the most to you. The power of those memories will tell more about the person who has passed away than all the biographical details.
If I’d told some of these stories at my father’s funeral, everyone in the memorial chapel would have known him in a different way. They would have understood that his life had consisted of much more than a Depression childhood, getting shot in the war and comical quirks. They would have seen that he had been loved, fiercely.