Eulogy examples

Good morning. For those who don't know me, I'm Laura, Ruth's youngest. Thank you for being here. Mom would have counted the chairs this morning and worried there weren't enough sandwiches.

My mother kept a list on the refrigerator for forty years. It was never the same list, but it always had the same heading: "Before Sunday." Before Sunday, she would call her sister in Ohio. Before Sunday, she would take soup to whoever on Maple Street was sick that week. Before Sunday, she would find out what was really going on with whichever of her three children had gone quiet on the phone. She was not a woman who waited for people to ask for help. She had usually already written them on the list.

When I was eleven, I lost a library book, and I was sure it was the end of the world. Mom didn't lecture me. She drove me to the library, stood next to me while I explained, and then paid the fine out of her purse without a word. In the car afterward she said, "Now you know you can survive telling the truth." I have thought about that sentence more times than I can count, at work, in my marriage, and this week.

She worked at the county clerk's office for twenty-six years, and people still stop me at the grocery store to tell me she helped them with a form, or a deadline, or a phone call nobody else would make. She never mentioned any of it at home. At home she was the one who knew where everything was, who remembered every birthday, and who laughed so hard at my father's terrible jokes that she had to sit down.

The last few years were slower. She couldn't drive anymore, so the list moved to a notebook by her chair, and we became the ones doing the errands. But she still ran it. Every visit started with, "Sit down, I need to ask you something," and it was always about someone else.

Mom, the list is on our refrigerators now. We'll call your sister. We'll take the soup. And we'll keep telling the truth, because you showed us we can survive it.

Thank you.

My name is Daniel, and Frank was my father.

Dad was not a talker. If you called the house, you got about forty seconds with him before he said, "Here's your mother." So I'll try to keep this short, because he'd be checking his watch.

He was a machinist for thirty-four years, and he believed that anything worth doing was worth measuring twice. He measured everything twice: the boards in the garage, the gas in the car before a trip, the words he said to us. He didn't waste many, so we learned to listen when he used them.

When I was sixteen, I backed his truck into the mailbox. I was ready for a speech. Instead he walked out, looked at the post, looked at me, and said, "Well. Let's go get the post-hole digger." We rebuilt it together that afternoon, and he let me do the measuring. It's still standing. I checked on Thursday.

That was how he loved people. He showed up with tools. When my sister moved apartments, he was there at six in the morning with rope and a thermos of coffee. When the neighbor's furnace went out in January, he was in their basement before the repairman returned the call. He never told us he was proud of us. He just kept showing up, and he kept every school report we ever brought home in a folder in the garage, labeled in his capital letters. We found it this week.

Dad, we read the folder. We heard you.

We'll measure twice. We'll show up early. And we'll keep the mailbox standing.

Hi everyone. I'm Emily, one of Grandma June's eleven grandchildren, and before anyone asks: yes, she had a favorite, and every single one of us was sure it was us.

That was her gift. She made each of us feel like we were the one she'd been waiting all week to see. When you walked into her kitchen, she'd put down whatever she was doing, say your name like it was good news, and push a plate toward you. You were not allowed to leave hungry. You were also not allowed to leave without a container of something for later, and you were expected to return the container.

Grandma played cards every Tuesday with the same four women for fifty years. She was very competitive and would never admit it. If you beat her at gin rummy, she'd say, "Well, good for you, sweetheart," in a voice that meant there would be a rematch, and there would be no mercy.

What I'll miss most are her letters. Real ones, in blue ink, even after we all had phones. She wrote to me every month I was away at college. Most of them were about the weather, the garden, and who at church had a new hip. But every one ended the same way: "Be kind, eat something green, and call your mother." I have every letter in a shoebox, and I've read them all this week.

Grandma, I'm going to be kind. I'm going to try to eat something green. And I've already called my mother.

We'll return the containers.

Good afternoon. I'm Michael, Walter's oldest grandson.

Grandpa taught me to fish when I was seven. I remember being impatient, reeling in every few seconds to see if anything had happened. He watched me do this for a while, then said, "The fish don't know you're in a hurry." I didn't catch anything that day. I don't think that was the point.

He was the most patient man I've known. He was a mail carrier for thirty years and walked the same route through the east side of town in every kind of weather. People on that route knew him by name. Some of them are here today, and I've been told more than once this week that he was the one who noticed if the mail piled up, and knocked on the door to check.

At home, he was always fixing something: a chair, a radio, my bicycle chain. He never threw anything away if it could be mended. He said things last when you take care of them, and that was true of the people in his life too. He was married to my grandmother for fifty-eight years. He took care of her, and she took care of him, and we all learned what that looks like by watching them.

In the last year, when he couldn't get out to the lake, I'd sit with him and we'd talk about fishing instead. He'd tell the same stories, and I'd let him, because the stories were the point too.

Grandpa, I'm not in a hurry anymore. Thank you for waiting for me to learn that.

I'm Rachel, Tom's big sister. He would want me to point out that he was taller than me from the age of thirteen, so "big" is doing a lot of work there.

Tom was the loudest person in every room he walked into, and somehow nobody ever minded. He talked to everyone: the cashier, the person behind him in line, the man selling hot dogs at every Cubs game we ever went to. He knew that man's name, his kids' names, and which of them was applying to college. I didn't know any of that. Tom did, because Tom asked.

Growing up, we fought about everything: the front seat, the remote, whose turn it was to feed the dog. And then, when I was nineteen and my first real heartbreak hit, it was my little brother who drove three hours to my dorm with a pizza and a terrible movie, and sat with me until I laughed. He never mentioned it again. That was Tom. He'd show up, and then act like it was nothing.

He was a wonderful uncle. My kids think he invented pancakes shaped like dinosaurs, and I'm not going to correct them. His nieces and his nephew were the people he was proudest of in the world, and they knew it, because he told them every time he saw them.

There's a lot about losing him that I don't have words for yet, and I don't think I'm supposed to today. What I do know is that he spent his life asking people how they were, and meaning it.

So, Tom: we're going to keep asking. And we'll learn the hot dog guy's name.

Hello. My name is Priya, and Dana and I have been friends since the first week of college, when she knocked on my door at midnight to ask if I had a stapler. I didn't. She came in anyway and stayed until three in the morning. That was the start of twenty-two years.

Dana's family knew one Dana. Her colleagues knew another. I want to tell you about the one her friends knew, because I think she'd want all of you to meet her.

She was the friend who remembered. If you mentioned a job interview in passing, she would text you that morning: "You've got this." If you had a hard anniversary, she'd send flowers without a card, because she knew you'd know. She kept a calendar of other people's important days, and I'm only now realizing how many of mine are on it.

She was also the worst person to watch a movie with. She talked through all of them. She guessed the ending in the first ten minutes and was right about eighty percent of the time, and she never let you forget the other twenty.

When my father was ill, Dana drove up every other weekend for four months. She didn't bring advice. She brought groceries, and folded laundry, and sat with my dad and let him tell her about his old car. I've never been able to thank her properly. I'm trying now.

To Dana's mom and dad, and her brother Sam: thank you for sharing her with us. She talked about you constantly. You were the first thing on her calendar every year.

Dana, I don't have a stapler. I still wish you'd knock.