As writers, we are frequently the ones asked to write eulogies for friends and family members. Even if we are not asked, we may feel moved to write eulogies to honor those we loved and then to share our writing with a literary audience. Reading author David Reich’s eulogy for his father and considering the comments he’s written for us about writing it will help us assume this responsibility and be able to write in this genre if we are called to do so. After David’s comments, I offer a writing idea inspired by his work.

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Welcome and thank you for coming today. My father would have been moved to see all of you here. I am moved to see you here.

[One beat]

Ecclesiastes Chapter 7, verses 1-4.

[Three beats]

I’d like to offer a few words in praise of my father on this unhappy day. My family and I have had plenty to say about his shortcomings in the last few years, as he approached the end of his time on earth and we struggled with him over his bad decisions, his self-defeating actions and ideas.

Now I’m going to try and restore some balance by talking very briefly about his life and pointing out a few of his many virtues. My father’s parents, Simon and Gertrude Reich, both came to this country in the big wave of Jewish immigrants shortly after the turn of the last century. Gertrude came from Krakow around age 13, her father having died of tuberculosis at the hospital on Ellis Island a day or two after he first set foot on American soil. Possibly with help from her brother Mark, a medical doctor who had trained in Poland and later practiced in New York, she managed to attend and graduate from high school and, at the time she met my grandfather, was working for the New York City health department, which was then in the business of manufacturing vaccines. She oversaw the filling of vaccine orders from all over the country—not bad for a recent immigrant in the nineteen-teens, a woman immigrant no less. Fittingly, she was an ardent proponent of women’s rights; I remember her talking about the suffragist marches she attended in her twenties.

My grandfather’s story is a little different. Simon came to New York from Tarnow, a small Polish city near the Belorussian border, as a young adult, and for a few years he worked with a relative, collecting scrap metal with a horse-drawn wagon. After a while, he joined a program sponsored by the Jewish philanthropist Baron de Hirsch where he was taught to farm, and my father spent his childhood first on a small farm in Delaware and later in the Bronx, where Simon had started a one-man business trucking produce in from the hinterlands. Come the Depression, the business went bust, and Simon supported the family by waiting tables at posh joints like Delmonico’s, meanwhile getting active in the waiters union and signing up with the local socialist party organization, on whose ticket he ran for New York City alderman, unsuccessfully.

It was from his parents that my father acquired his political values. They felt deeply about what went on in their adopted country, especially when it came to the lives of average, everyday people, and my father learned to feel deeply, too. This was driven home for me most recently last fall, when he was taking an entrance interview at one of the assisted living places that Martha and I had located for him. After a bunch of standard-sounding questions, the interviewer asked him, “What makes you sad?” Not normally a guy to share emotions, he took a little while to think this one over. Finally, he said it would make him sad if President Obama lost the election. This wasn’t meant to curry favor with the interviewer, either: she had already made her politics clear, and I must tell you they weren’t very progressive. I never asked him about this, but it may even be that he was trying to needle the interviewer by giving her that answer.

Another recent time, he was talking to his new tax advisor, the old one having picked up and moved to Hawaii. The new advisor raised the option of creating a trust for tax-avoidance purposes. “No,” Dad said flatly. “I think people should pay taxes.”

After finishing high school in the Bronx, my father studied engineering, earning a degree from City College and taking graduate courses at NYU. Over the years, he worked on all sorts of electronics projects for companies like Phillips, General Electric, and General Instrument. He finished his career with a 15 year stretch as chief engineer of a small defense contractor in East New York, Brooklyn.

In the end he was making quite a decent living, and he retired comfortably. Yet more than once, I’ve heard him say that money was something that didn’t mean a lot to him, and I never took those words as an empty boast. If he was careful with his worldly wealth, he was also extremely  generous. Not only did he feed and clothe us as kids and pay for the camps and music lessons, the religious instruction and college tuition—the things middle class parents in the ’50s and ’60s were expected to do as a matter of course–but he also continued helping out for many years to come. I suppose it was a way for a guy who’d never been that demonstrative to show his love of family. I think especially of the time, twenty years ago, when Martha and I were buying our house. Martha had finally landed a job after a long stretch of unemployment; I had been laid off the year before and was barely getting by on freelance editing work. When I asked Dad to loan us a large sum of money over and above the bank loan we were getting, he said he would do it on one condition: that we promise not to pay him back.

This wasn’t the last time he supplied cash infusions, or sent us on vacations, or handed us big checks on birthdays. His generosity extended beyond family, too: he contributed money to a wide range of charities and leftish political organizations, a fact that the world of charitable giving seemed keenly aware of. Most days found his mailbox stuffed with fundraising appeals.

I didn’t fully appreciate another of his virtues until my late teens, when a couple of my high school friends told me they liked to hang out at our house because they always got a kick out of Dad’s remarks. My first memory of his sense of humor dates back to a time before I learned to read. I might have been two or three—no more. One night after dinner, he was appointed to read to me out of a kid’s book of Bible stories. When he got to the story of the biblical David, he substituted “Irving” for the name of the hero, as in “Irving and Goliath.” Possibly because my own name is David, this pissed me off inordinately. I stamped my little feet and told him over and over to read the name right, but he insisted on doing it his way. He insisted on “Irving,” and that’s what he read to me all through the story, till Goliath was slain and Irving assumed the throne of Israel.

A similar instance came some years later, when I was eleven or twelve or so. I somehow came to learn of the old-time politician Senator Bilbo, a fellow whose name appealed to my imagination and my sense of fun. I yearned to know this Bilbo’s first name, too, hoping it would be as much fun as his surname, and so I raised the question one evening at dinner. When Dad insisted, repeatedly, that the senator’s first name was Merganser, I didn’t believe him, not entirely, but neither was I sure he was pulling my leg. By the time I found out that a merganser is a sort of rarified duck, I was probably already out of college. Around the same time I also learned that the senator’s full name was Theodore Bilbo, but by then Merganser Bilbo rang truer to me. Even now it still sounds better.

If we had all day, I could talk at length about some of my father’s other virtues: his love for Frieda, my stepmother, and the loss he felt upon her death, 13 years ago this past winter; the fascination with other countries and cultures that helped fuel his boyhood interest in ham radio and his latter day travels to Europe and China; all the repair and rehab work that he did or helped me do in the house he helped Martha and me and buy, teaching me carpentry and masonry repair tricks and even, at age 90, holding my shaky extension ladder while I painted the highest part of our barn. We sought his advice on everything from personal finance to car repair, until we finally absorbed enough of his knowledge that we started being able to advise ourselves.

OK, this speech has gone on a little longer than I originally planned. We don’t have all day, I remind myself, but I do want to tell you one more story if you’ll indulge me for another minute.

Recently, my father, who’d never spent a night in a hospital before, confronted for the first time the challenges of failing health. During what turned out to be his last year, he complained a lot more and joked around less, but still his sense of humor appeared, in flashes, often in the form of jokes aimed at his own predicament–some of them exceedingly strange, I must say. As his memory and eyesight worsened, the never-ending influx of fundraising letters that I mentioned earlier got to be more than he knew how to handle, and in the last months before he moved from his condo to assisted living, he filled four cardboard boxes, and I mean big cardboard boxes, with unopened letters from the causes he’d been so generous to—everything from Project Bread to the Wilderness Society and Emily’s List. When I asked why he didn’t just take these letters down to the recycling bin, he told me with a little smile that he was collecting them for me, so that I might dispose of them after his death.

[Three beats]

OK, Dad [one beat]. I guess I will.

In the mean time, goodbye, and thanks for the laughs and all the help. [One beat]

Our world will be a smaller and meaner place without you in it. Our only solace is in knowing your struggles are done.

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David’s conversational tone at the end brings tears to my eyes as he moves his attention to the audience at his father’s funeral to the audience of his deceased father.

In this way, we are all saying goodbye to David’s father as David takes the lead and we follow. We are witnessing a very, very difficult emotional moment, the acknowledgement of love and of loss and of continuation in another’s spirit.

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After being asked to publish the eulogy on Writing It Real, David offered to add his thoughts about writing it as well as provided an informative response to one of my comments:

People write eulogies out of pure emotion, without the kind of deliberation that goes into most other writing, I think, though because I have internalized a lot of the tricks that writers deploy, I was able to use them without a lot of conscious deliberation. Anyway, I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a model eulogy, unless you’re talking about something like “Lycidas,” which was really written for literary purposes—apparently Milton barely knew the dead guy that the poem was supposedly written about.

It might be worth mentioning that most examples in this eulogy take the form of narrative. In fact, I believe that’s what most eulogies are: strung together stories.

It is definitely worth pointing out two ways in which the writing of eulogies, at least this one, does resemble other writing: that, although I was writing it on deadline (pun acknowledged) it developed through revision and accretion over time and that it benefited from a first reader’s suggestions. Specifically, I worked on it for a week or ten days, starting while my father was still alive. Working on it distracted me, for an hour or two daily, from the fact that my father was dying—not very prettily and at the end of many months of struggle between us over the healthcare decisions he had made. The first reader, of course, was my wife Martha, and she made a number of crucial suggestions, most importantly, the suggestion that I add more family history, which had been absent from earlier drafts. I thought that adding all that in would create structure problems, but if it did, they were fairly easy to deal with.

I think I know what you mean, Sheila, by “the audience of his deceased father,” but I had to read it several times over before I got it. In any case, I think the audience at the funeral, if they were paying attention, would have been focused on my father all the way through. I use the device called apostrophe—addressing a person or thing not present—and used more by poets than prose writers (see these links to sample poems at The Poetry Foundation) for emotional effect rather than for redirecting audience attention. The effect in this case involves bringing my father into the room; that is, bringing his consciousness (figuratively or magically) into the room, since his body was of course already there. I think some kind of catharsis may result from that last communication with the dead person.

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If You Are Writing a Eulogy
How might you write a eulogy for someone you have strong feelings about? Perhaps you can take a lesson from David’s approach:

Think about the person’s ancestry, where they were from and how your loved one grew up. Bring in the interests in your loved one’s life that might have been shaped by ancestry.

Then enter the scene yourself and be with your loved one in remembering of attributes and how you learned of them and why you treasured them. They are probably connected to how the person grew up.

Use specific examples as they speak the loudest about the person who is gone and your relationship. And the more specific we are, the more universal the appeal of our words. Listeners associate to similar experiences in their lives, even if the details are a little different. But without details, we are not being shown, merely told and we can’t associate and see ourselves in the situations. Therefore, as David shows us, we must not leave details out. If we write too long, it is easier to shorten up by compressing and deleting some details. Don’t skip details for fear of writing too long. You delve more deeply into your memories with details and you bring your feelings to light with details.

Next, in your writing, move to the near present and expand on one or two of the attributes that will allow you to move toward an ending, an exit from the speech, a way to say goodbye with thanks for having known the person you have lost while memory and love linger and infuse your days. David does this so well with his report of interpersonal exchange he had with his father about the boxes of appeals from the nonprofits his father supported and the way he answers now, after his father is gone. The eulogy is more than a speech to honor the dead at funerals and memorials. It is a way to remember them for years to come.