How to Give a Eulogy
It's no easy task summing up someone's life in just a few words. But I have my rules.
MOST POPULAR
AT MY VERY FIRST FUNERAL, I wanted to say something. It was for a kid I'd known in high school who had somehow managed to get hit by a car in front of a bar outside my hometown. I'd read about it in the paper, left work, and snuck into the back of the service. I hadn't known the guy all that well, but I remembered that he had a reputation for being particularly tough, the kind of guy you wouldn't want to mess with. There was a picture of him somewhere--at the door or on the altar or in someone's hands--and I remember that his hair was hanging down in front of his right eye, just as it always had in high school. I sat there, having come for selfish reasons, out of curiosity, really, thinking, Why was his hair always in front of his eye?
I wish I had spoken. I wish I had stood up and said something about that hair. The way this tough guy sort of hid behind that shock of hair, it told me something about him. But I kept quiet. I listened to the eulogy. I don't remember one word of it. But the years flip by, and the hair is still in his eyes.
I've been asked to deliver a half dozen eulogies since then. People tell me I'm good at it. I don't care about that. Being good at public speaking is just a party trick. I care about the task.
I've heard people say they dread giving eulogies. How, they ask, can you summarize a person's life in a series of moments? I always shrug. It is hard. But I do have my rules.
FIRST THING TO KNOW is this: Giving a eulogy is good for you. Period.
It may hurt to write it. And reading it? For some, that's the worst part. The world might spin a little, and everything familiar to you might fade for a few minutes. But remember, remind yourself as you stand there, you are the lucky one.
And that's not because you aren't dead. You were selected. You get to stand, face the group, the family, the world, and add it up. You're being asked to do something at the very moment when nothing can be done. You get the last word in the attempt to define the outlines of a life. I don't care what you say, bub: That is a gift.
If the idea bores you in some way, don't do it. If on some level you are not interested in the problem of the assignment, this framing of a life, then simply say no. Suggest someone else. Say you're too overcome with grief. Get out of it. The job matters.
THE WRITING and reading of a eulogy is, above all, the simple and elegant search for small truths. They don't have to be truths that everyone agrees on, just ones they will recognize. This can be surprisingly hard, to take notice of the smallest, most unpolished details of a life and set them up for us to stare at in the wonder of recognition.
He protected his family above all else.
She could sometimes be a bully.
He thought out every answer he ever gave before he spoke. And he put his finger on his cheek when he did it.
She never wanted to talk about herself.
That man loved a cigar.
THEY MAY TELL YOU that you have three minutes. They may tell you that you have five. They may tell you to take all the time you want. It doesn't matter: Time is always an insult at a funeral. Work within the finite space you're given. Remember that the eulogy is just one part of the formation.
STANDING THERE on the dais, consider the world as a series of concentric rings of loyalty. The people in the nearest ring, those in the front row, are owed the most. You should speak first to them. And then, in the next measure, to the room itself, which is the next ring, and only then to the physical world outside, the neighborhood, the town, the place, and then, just maybe, to the machinations of life-muffling institutions.
Recently I was at the funeral of a friend who died a long, painful death from cancer. I was sitting there in the midday, with heavy wedges of light falling through the church windows, thinking about how she liked to smoke cigars with her husband and how she owned a house that was built entirely underground. A speaker got up and spoke about the woman's death and the need for stem-cell research. Then the priest got up and urged everyone to listen to God's word through the church. And then another speaker mentioned stem cells. Soon I forgot about my friend and the house and the cigars, and suddenly it was like watching The McLaughlin Group on a really dim frequency.
Remember your rings of loyalty.
YOU MUST WRITE IT DOWN. This is not a wedding toast. In grief, people ought not be forced to wander through memories that may not be acute, well framed, and, above all, purposeful.
AVOID SIMILES, the weakest and most friable form of metaphor. If, like me, you can't avoid them altogether, at least spend some time on them. Construct them. Any fool can say, "Mike was like a tiger," and he wouldn't likely be wrong. I heard that one recently, and I found myself sitting there thinking not of Mike but of tigers and the stupid things people say about them--that they have heart, that they are ferocious, that they are the "last known survivor," in the droning lyrics of "Eye of the Tiger." I found myself thinking, Mike wasn't like a tiger at all. Tigers are giant eating machines that lie around the zoo all day like so many junkies in a deep, sun-warmed nod. There's a simile for you. You may want to argue that. But at least you get my point, because I know you're not thinking about Mike.
ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW
YOU MAY CRY. Accept it. But you should not let yourself be hobbled. A eulogy is not a chance to show off what you feel. Need I say this? It is not about you.
That's why you write it down. That's why you read it aloud until you feel in yourself every response you might have to every detail. You want to get through the moments that will touch you. When my aunt Jane died, I read a catalog of truths about her in the middle of the eulogy. At one point I said, "She smoked too much." I had read the thing to my dad in our hotel maybe six times. I'd read it the night before about fifteen more. I'd read it probably seven times that very morning, and I'd barely even noticed the line.
But in the church, on the heels of my father's brilliant eulogy, with my mother not ten feet away from me, the line simply stopped me cold. I could see my aunt's hands and the huge glass ashtrays she favored with three or four lipstick-smudged butts cocked in the ashes. I hadn't expected to feel that. I started to cry. Later on, my brother said he hardly noticed it. Sometimes I think it must have been a gulp, but it felt more like an ax to the sternum.
I can recall, inside that moment, that the way I kept my composure was to say to myself, I owe her this much at least. It was a mantra I made up in advance. I said it to myself twice before I could go on. Make up a mantra to get yourself through those moments. Scratch it out on the top of every page.
THERE ARE SIMPLER RULES: Don't read poetry unless you knew it going in. Don't use Bartlett's. Don't do imitations. Don't sing, unless they ask you to. Even then, consider not singing.
YOU MUST MAKE them laugh. Laughs are a pivot point in a funeral. They are your responsibility. The best laughs come by forcing people not to idealize the dead. In order to do this, you have to be willing to tell a story, at the closing of which you draw conclusions that no one expects.
When my friend Mary died, I could not type her name without crying. What can I tell you? I loved her. I'm not even offering you any piece of that love here. I don't know you. That's how much I want to keep that near me. I will tell you this: After she died, I asked to give her eulogy. I asked. It felt egotistical to do so, as if I were putting myself at the center of something that was not about me at all. But I stood in back of her house with her husband, wiping my nose on my sleeve while the gutters were spewing out rainwater at our feet, and told him I wanted it.
For Mary, I started by listing all the things everyone agreed on: that she was kind, that she cared about others, that she had delighted us--all of us, really--with small gifts from her travels, thoughtful notes, sweet inquiries after our children and families. It was not hard. She was an incredible person. I knew that everyone agreed on that.
I was not there to tell people what we all agreed on. That isn't telling at all. Eulogies are assertions about the dead and the living alike. I knew more, so I paused and said, "But I'm here to tell you that Mary was not a glass of milk." I was about to speak about her combativeness, her prickly side, her argumentative nature. But for a moment, the air went out of the room.
In any good eulogy, there are moments of panic. Silences. Laughter in the wrong places. Moments when the speaker gets choked up. These moments--the tears or the silence--these are why you learn to pause.
So I stopped for just a second. Then I heard her daughter laugh, a little at first and then more. And then both daughters. And I remembered my concentric rings of loyalty. Her laughter gave permission to the room to laugh with her. I looked at her then. I pointed my finger. "She knows what I'm talking about!" I said. And then we were all laughing.
Even so, I wanted to cry just then. That's one of those surprises that comes when you give a eulogy, one of those things you prepare for but do not expect. But I had more to read and more that I owed Mary. I took a deep breath then, and I did the thing everyone does after someone they loved has died.
I gathered myself. And I decided to proceed.
