My Last Eulogy Could Have Been My Own
I’m not sure how I got into the eulogy business, but it was burgeoning. It seemed like I kept getting the call. Someone dies (they don’t call), and I get a call (someone else does that). Dave, how would you like to give a eulogy?
Giving a eulogy wasn’t my favorite thing, but it wasn’t my least favorite thing either, and for many years I good-naturedly assented to a job that would cause most people to totally freak out. When someone asked, I took it as a compliment, and in return I worked diligently to do the best job I could.
Part of the freaking out is having to maintain composure while speaking about someone whom you loved very much. There is always a moment, even with diligent preparation, when your heart gets stuck in your throat. I don’t cry very often, am not one to sob or weep, that’s not the problem. But at that certain moment your heart heats up, and your voice and your lips begin to quiver. Well, that is a moment where you can totally lose it, and then have to dig your way out of that hole. Besides being embarrassing, it can waste a lot of good people’s time. I try not to do that, and so far I have been able to push through and keep going when that moment came.
I spoke at my grandfather’s and grandmother’s funerals. I also delivered my Dad’s eulogy. I had a lot to say about him, and when the moment came, I got past it and pushed on to the finish. The best moment of all is when you are done. You have spoken truth, spoken with all of your love and emotion, you’ve faithfully delivered on your promise, just as my Dad had always done. All the butterflies, tension, and anxiety that I walked with up to front of the church suddenly and completely vanished after my final word was spoken. At that moment, a wonderful feeling of peace envelopes me. It is as if I am feeling a long, deep embrace from my Dad. At that moment, all the other moments are worth it.
When my Mom passed, my family assumed I would speak, and I assumed the job. No surprises there. In the days prior to her service I began gathering memories and experiences in my mind, figuring I would sort them out and arrange into a narrative.
My Mom had been in hospice in Arizona, being cared for by my sister Terrie and her husband Dante. It was clear she was on the decline, and pneumonia combined with a broken hip was insurmountable. I had visited her the week before and said what I knew were goodbyes. When the word came, it was no surprise. I went to work crafting the words that would send her off. I had done this before, I knew how to handle this.
But did I really? I wondered about myself. How come I can go about this task in a business-like manner? I just lost my mother. I felt I was in a strange sort of twilight zone. Why was I not feeling what I was supposed to be feeling? Why could I not cry tears?
Another weird thing that was happening was that I seemed to be procrastinating. It was the day before her memorial and I had not written a word. Don’t worry, I told myself. That will come easily enough once I start. I’ll do it this evening. The evening came and went. No worries, I will wake up at midnight and get it done.
At midnight I sat there looking at a blank sheet of paper for a good while. At one a.m. I started writing. It was not flowing the way it usually did, it was more of a struggle. I back-tracked and rewrote, added and subtracted, and still it seemed incomplete. By this time it was four in the morning. I could polish it when I woke up after six.
Now from a distance, I recognize my Mom was not an outwardly emotional woman. Of course she had deep feelings, like everyone, but she grew up learning to bury them. Like many of her family and generation she was a woman of discipline and duty. The eldest daughter, and the mother of six children, she was always the one responsible. She had a job to do. I had only one memory of her letting loose and weeping, and as a young child I found that extremely harrowing and incomprehensible. As a mother, she knew everyone counted on her to be in control, and she was, except that one time.
And at six a.m. on the morning of her funeral I wasn’t. I woke up with a pain in my chest. That was strange. The only chest pains I had ever experienced had been after two hours of running on the soccer field in the Los Angeles basin smog. Here I am - first thing in the morning with chest pain, with absolutely no physical activity. My eulogy was finished and typed up. We were supposed to be at St. Bruno’s at 10.
My wife and I were staying in a hotel in Fullerton twenty minutes away. I was concerned about my pain, however I knew that if I told Maria, she would be having a heart attack too. So I said nothing, thought to myself - we’ll just have to see how this plays out.
An hour later, no change. So now I start thinking - the smart thing to do is to stop by the Emergency Room at St. Jude’s Hospital down the street. That’s what I would tell anyone they should do. But I thought once you go through those double doors you’ll probably spend half a day there, even if everything checks out fine. And if that happens, who is going to give the eulogy?
All this is going through my head as we are getting showered and dressed, as if everything is normal. The only person in the world who knows about this is me. And I’m not talking. I’m running through scenarios in my head ranging from What if I go to the service and keel over there? To What if it is just gas? I have never been much of a hypochondriac, if anything I under-think medical issues. Lump on my head? Yeah, it’s always been like that.
So given the choice of keeling over and spoiling my Mom’s eulogy versus going to the ER for a very expensive series of tests that show I’m fine and then having to explain that’s why I missed the funeral, I choose not the most rational but the least embarrassing of the two. After all if I die at the funeral, I won’t care. I’ll be dead. Whereas if I go to the ER everyone will know I was a nervous Nellie and thought more of my own personal safety than sending off my Mom. If this makes no sense to you, that’s good. You are processing this whole thing much better than I was, congratulations.
So I walked through door number one which was the double doors of St. Bruno’s, not the double doors of St. Jude. The eulogy went well, I made it through the moment and pressed on to the finish. The wonderful moment of peace after the final word cured my chest pain, which really was my heart aching, the whole time.
I never cried for my Mom, and I thought that was strange. Was there something wrong with me? No, I never cried until the next day. I rounded a corner, just randomly, not even thinking about anything. It suddenly hit me, out of the blue. I stumbled to my knees and just wept, cried and cried, probably a gallon of tears. That had never happened, ever. But that’s what I did.
I wept, because I realized I was my mother’s son.
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