Eulogy examples

Good morning. I’m Dana, Ruth’s youngest, the one she called “the late one,” because I was born nine days past my due date and, according to Mom, never caught up.

Most of you knew her from Garfield Elementary, where she ran the cafeteria for twenty-six years. If you went to school there, she knew your name, your lunch number and whether you were trading away your carrots. She was on your side either way.

At home there were four of us kids and one bathroom, and she ran it like the lunch line. Two minutes each, no exceptions, and a kitchen timer on the sink to prove it.

My mother wrote notes. Every lunch she ever packed me, from kindergarten through senior year, had a note in it. Most of them were not deep. “Eat the apple, Dana.” “Your brother has the car, so walk home with Kim.” “I saw that report card. We’ll talk.”

When I left for college, I thought the notes were finally over. Three weeks in, a care package arrived, and taped to a box of granola bars was a note that said, “Eat the apple.” There was no apple in the box. I called her, and she said, “Well, go buy one.”

I didn’t understand what those notes cost her until I had kids of my own. She was up at five and worked a full shift on her feet. Then she came home to four children, a husband on second shift at the plant, and the church supper she’d signed up for again. And she still found a pen.

What I learned from her is to do the small things, and to do them on time. Remember the dentist appointment. Write the note when you’re tired, and especially when someone is having a bad week.

This week I was cleaning out her kitchen drawer, and I found a stack of index cards with a rubber band around them. They were grocery lists, but in the margins she’d written reminders to herself. “Call Kim about the interview.” “Ask Dana how Leo’s ear is.” She was keeping track of all of us, right up to the end.

Mom, I’m going to keep writing the notes. Leo already rolls his eyes at them, so I know I’m doing it right.

Thank you for the bathroom timer, and for every note, even the ones about the apple. I love you, Mom.

Hi, everyone. I’m Marcus, Gene’s son.

I rewrote this a lot of times, because my dad and I didn’t have an easy road, and many of you know that. For a big part of my childhood he was somewhere on Interstate 80 with a load of something, and when he was home, he wasn’t always the dad we needed. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and he wouldn’t want me to.

But I want to tell you about the second half.

When Dad was fifty-eight, he called me on a Tuesday night, which he never did. He said, “I’ve been sober thirty days, and they tell me I’m supposed to make a list.” I was on the list. He drove four hours to my apartment in Omaha, sat on my couch and said he was sorry, and he didn’t make a single excuse. Then he asked if I had any coffee. I didn’t, and he looked at me like that was the real tragedy.

After that, he started showing up. He came to my daughter Tasha’s softball games and sat in the same spot every time, third row, first-base side, with a thermos of coffee he’d made too strong. He learned the name of every girl on the team. He yelled “Good eye” at every pitch she didn’t swing at, including the strikes.

He fixed things without being asked: my porch steps, my garbage disposal, even my neighbor’s lawn mower. I think fixing things was how he said what he didn’t have words for.

Dad taught me two things, and he taught them in the wrong order. First, what it costs a family when you’re not there. Then, that a man can start being there at fifty-eight.

He got twelve years sober. Twelve years of softball games and porch steps and bad coffee. I’m grateful for every one of them, and I’m sad there weren’t more.

Dad, you made your list, and you worked your way through it. You don’t owe me anything. Rest easy. I’ll make the coffee too strong, for you.

Good afternoon. My name is Priya, and Lakshmi Raman was my grandmother. We called her Paati, which is Tamil for grandmother, and she insisted the mail carrier call her that too.

Paati moved from Chennai to Edison, New Jersey, when she was sixty-two, to help my parents raise me and my brother, Arjun. She had never lived anywhere cold. Her first winter, she walked to the mailbox in two sweaters, my father’s ski jacket and a wool shawl. She said, “This country is very beautiful, but whoever chose the weather should be ashamed.”

She ran our house from the kitchen. Every morning at six the pressure cooker whistled, and that was our alarm clock for most of my childhood. She taught me to make dosa when I was nine. My first one looked like a map of Florida. She ate it anyway, told me it was very good, and then showed me again, every Saturday, until I got it right. It took about four years.

She loved two things nobody expected: game shows and the New York Mets. She learned half her English shouting answers at the television. She was wrong a lot, and she was confident every time. And she suffered through Mets seasons like she’d been born in Queens.

Every evening she lit the lamp at the little shrine in the kitchen and said her prayers. When I was small, I stood next to her and copied the words without knowing what they meant. When I was older, I asked her. She said, “Mostly I am asking God to look after the people I love. The list keeps getting longer, so it takes more time.”

She taught me to keep adding people to the list. She added my husband, Daniel, the first time he ate three helpings of her sambar. She added his parents, our neighbors, the mail carrier and half of my brother’s soccer team.

Paati, the house is too quiet in the mornings now. I’ll make dosa on Saturdays. They’re round now. Thank you for crossing an ocean to help raise us.

Thank you all for being here. I’m Walter. Frank and I were together for thirty-one years, and married for the last eleven, once Pennsylvania caught up with us.

Frank would hate this, by the way. He loved a crowd, but he’d hate that I’m the one talking. For thirty-one years he told all our stories, and he told them better and longer than I ever could.

So I’ll tell one of his.

On our first date, he took me to a diner in Pittsburgh and ordered for both of us without asking. Pancakes, at seven o’clock at night. I said, “What if I don’t like pancakes?” He said, “Then we’ll know early, and nobody’s time gets wasted.” I liked the pancakes.

Frank made decisions fast and said what he thought, and he was right often enough that it was hard to stay mad.

He taught high school chemistry for thirty-four years. He kept a jar on his desk labeled “Do not drink,” filled with plain water, and in the middle of class he’d take a sip just to watch the front row panic. Former students stopped him in the grocery store for decades. He remembered every one of them, or he pretended so well that it counted.

Frank didn’t believe in an afterlife, and he asked that nobody here pretend he did. He told me once that we get one turn, and the job is to leave the place a little kinder than we found it. He thought being remembered was the part that lasts. So I’m asking you to do the remembering. Tell his stories. Tell them wrong, and tell them long, the way he did.

He taught me that you pick each other again every morning, including the hard ones. Some mornings that meant laughing about the pancakes instead of arguing about the dishes. Frank chose me every morning for thirty-one years, and I chose him right back.

Frank, you were right about the pancakes. You were right about most things, and I can admit that now, since you can’t gloat. Thank you for my one turn with you.

Hello, everyone. I’m Sam Liu. Miriam Gold was my best friend for forty-four years, starting the day we were assigned to the same dorm room at Ohio State and she announced she had already taken the bed by the window.

She didn’t apologize. She said, “You seem like a hallway person.” As it turned out, I was a hallway person.

Miriam was the friend who called first. When my father died, she was on my doorstep before I’d hung up with the funeral home, holding a pan of noodle kugel and a box of tissues, and she stayed three days. When my marriage ended, she drove me to the lawyer’s office and waited in the parking lot, doing the crossword in pen. When I was offered the job in Chicago, she was the one who made me take it. She said, “Sam, you’ll regret staying more than you’ll regret leaving. And Chicago has an airport. I checked.”

She used that airport. For twenty years she flew out every March for my birthday, and every year she brought the same thing, a terrible card she’d been saving since the March before. I have all twenty in a shoebox. One of them plays a polka when you open it. It still works.

Miriam showed me how grown-up friends do it. You don’t see each other every week. You show up for the big days and call on the small ones. She never kept score, and she never once made me feel like a burden.

In Miriam’s faith, when someone dies, people say, “May her memory be a blessing.” For years I heard that as a polite thing to say. This week I started hearing it as a request to let her change how I live.

So I’m going to call first. I’m going to bring the kugel, even though mine won’t be as good. And next March, I’m going to buy myself a terrible birthday card and laugh at it the way she would have.

Miriam, thank you for giving me the hallway. I’d take it again, every time. May your memory be a blessing.

Good morning. I’m Denise, and I lived next door to Harold Pruitt for nineteen years.

Harold shoveled our sidewalk before we were awake, every snow, for nineteen winters. He never mentioned it. For the first two years, my husband thought the city did it.

When my son Malik was learning to ride a bike, Harold sat on his porch and gave advice nobody asked for. “Look where you want to go, not at the mailbox.” Malik hit the mailbox anyway. Harold fixed the mailbox.

He showed me you can look after people you barely know just by paying attention. He noticed when our car hadn’t moved in a week, and he knocked. He noticed when we looked tired, and he brought tomatoes.

Harold, the sidewalk is going to look strange this winter. I’ll do the shoveling now, and I’ll do yours too. Thank you for nineteen years of noticing.

Hi, everyone. I’m Joey. Ray Castellano was my uncle, my godfather and the worst card player in South Philadelphia.

He lost to me at gin rummy every Sunday after Mass for twenty-five years. At my wedding, my aunt told me he’d been losing on purpose since I was seven. He kept doing it after I knew.

Uncle Ray never had kids of his own, but he never missed anything of mine. First Communion, graduation, and the night I got my license and backed his Buick into a fire hydrant. He paid for the hydrant and told my mother it was his fault.

Uncle Ray taught me that one way to be generous is to let other people win. Sometimes you let them win for twenty-five years.

Uncle Ray, I hope there’s a card table where you are now, and I hope somebody finally beats you fair and square. We’ll keep you in our prayers. Save me a seat.

Good afternoon. I’m Kofi, Kwame’s little brother. I’m forty-eight, and he still introduced me that way.

When our family came to Houston from Accra, Kwame was twelve and I was six. That first year he walked me to school every day. He taught me which words to say to the other kids, and which words never to say in front of our mother. He was right about both lists.

Kwame grew up to be an engineer, a deacon at our church and a father of three, and he was proudest of the last one. He also believed he could cook anything on a grill, which he could not. We have all eaten his jollof rice made on a gas grill, and we are all still here.

He taught me to go first. Go first to the new school, go first to apologize, go first when someone needs help moving a couch.

Kwame, you walked ahead of me my whole life. Now you’ve gone first again. I’ll follow your directions until I catch up.