Eulogy Examples

There is a photograph on my refrigerator of my mother taken sometime in the late seventies. She's standing in a kitchen that isn't the kitchen I grew up in — she's young, mid-twenties, and she's laughing at something off-camera. I don't know who took it or what made her laugh. But I have kept it on my refrigerator for twelve years because it captures something I never knew how to name until now.

She looks like herself. Completely, unguardedly herself — not performing happiness or managing a situation or taking care of someone. Just laughing, in the kitchen, young.

I've been thinking about this photograph because what I want to say about my mother is that underneath everything she did for us — and she did enormous amounts, over decades, without complaint or keeping score — there was a person. A specific, particular, remarkable person who had opinions and enthusiasms and jokes and a capacity for joy that I sometimes didn't give enough credit to while she was alive to receive it.

She taught me how to cook, which I resisted for years and now consider one of the central gifts of my life. She taught me to read people, which she did without calling it a skill. She told me things about my grandparents that I wouldn't otherwise have known, which gave me a way of understanding my own history that I carry with me.

She was patient in the particular way of people who have decided that this moment, right now, is the one that matters. I am not like her in this way, and I consider it a deficit.

She loved us. She loved us in the specific and total way that good parents love their children — not because we earned it, not contingently, but completely, as a matter of fact.

I'm going to miss her for the rest of my life. I'm already missing her. And I am grateful, beyond what I know how to say, for the photograph on my refrigerator. She was laughing. She was herself. She was here.

The first thing I want to say is that I'm still not entirely sure I believe this. I keep expecting to see a message from her that makes this all make sense, and there isn't one, and I'm going to have to adjust to that, but I am not there yet.

Meredith was the person I called first when anything happened. Good news, bad news, the weird middle-of-the-day news that doesn't fit anywhere — she was the first call. This was true for twenty-two years, which is more than half my life, and I don't entirely know what to do with the fact that it's going to be different now.

What I want you to know about her — what I need the people in this room to carry out with them — is that she was specific. She was not generically kind or vaguely wonderful. She was specifically attentive. She remembered things you told her years ago and asked about them later. She saw you in the particular, not the aggregate. She gave you her actual full attention, which is rarer than it sounds and more valuable than I can calculate.

She was also funnier than most people knew if they didn't know her well. The humor was dry and well-timed and came when you weren't expecting it, and it always had a bit of truth in it, which is the best kind.

She was a loyal person. Not in a way she announced — in a way she demonstrated, repeatedly, over twenty-two years. She showed up. She stayed. She was there.

I miss her. I'm going to miss her in the specific and ongoing way that means this is not going to get easier fast. And I'm grateful for every year of it. She was my person. That doesn't change because she's gone.