The Eulogy You Write to No One

There is a piece of writing that almost no one does, and it is the eulogy for the person who is still alive. Not the one you will deliver at the service. The one you will keep, the one no one else will read, the one in which you say plainly what you actually think of them. The thing you will tell yourself, on the day after, that you wish you had said in time.

Pick a person. Not the easiest one. The one you suspect you have been taking for granted. The mother, the old friend, the sibling who became the kind of stranger that only siblings can become. Sit down with a sheet of paper or a blank document and write the thing you would say if you were asked to summarize the role this person has played in your life. Not their accomplishments. Their presence.

The first paragraph is hard. The instinct is toward the biographical: where they were born, what they did for a living, the children's names. Push past it. The eulogy you mean to write is the one about the small specific moments. The way they laughed at the obvious jokes. The fact that they always called when you were sick. The particular way they held a hand of cards. The smell of their car. The thing they always said before hanging up the phone.

You will find, two paragraphs in, that you remember more than you thought. This is good. The forgetting that you had assumed was permanent was actually only inattention. The memories are there. They needed a question to come out.

When you finish, do not send it. Do not turn it into a card or a letter or a poem. Put it somewhere you can find it. A folder. A drawer.

Then, separately, do the small thing the writing makes obvious. Call the person. Not to read them the eulogy. Just to call them. To do the call you have not done in months. The eulogy will have reminded you of what the calls used to be for. The call is the deliverable. The writing is the preparation.

Some weeks later, write another one for someone else. The practice expands. You start noticing the people in your life as people you might one day have to summarize. The noticing is the gift. The summarizing is the side-effect.

There is, eventually, a day on which you will be asked to give the actual remembrance. The grief will not be smaller because you wrote the early version. The grief is its own thing. But you will not be saying the words for the first time, and the person will not be hearing them for the first time, because the calls happened. The eulogy you wrote to no one was the thing that made the calls happen. That is what it is for.

<!-- beal:expanded:v1 -->

What the unsent eulogy teaches is what the daily journal cannot. The journal records the day. The eulogy records the shape of a life as you currently understand it. The two are different exercises and they reach different muscles. The journal is a small daily honesty. The eulogy is a periodic honesty, written in months and years rather than in days.

It helps to write the eulogy for someone alive. A grandparent still well enough to walk to the corner store. A teacher whose lesson is still working on you twenty years later. An older sibling who has begun to seem mortal in a way they did not seem mortal when you were both children. The exercise is not about death. It is about noticing, while you can still talk to the person, what you would say if you could not.

There is a version of this exercise that goes wrong. The version goes wrong when the eulogy becomes an argument for your own grief. Notice when the words start to be about you. Set the page down. Walk around the block. Come back and try again. The good eulogy is the one in which the writer disappears into the subject. The bad eulogy is the one in which the writer leaves footprints on every paragraph.

Finish the eulogy. Do not leave it in pieces. There is something completing about writing the closing sentence even for an exercise no one will read. The closing sentence is where the form ends and the felt argument begins. After writing it, you will know a little more about what you actually believe about the person, and by implication about what you believe is worth living for.

Re-read the eulogy a year later. Almost always, a paragraph will seem wrong. The person has, in the interval, done something the older version of the eulogy could not have predicted. Rewrite the paragraph. The eulogy is not a fixed document; it is a small piece of slowly evolving attention. The annual rewrite becomes, in itself, a form of practice. It teaches you to update your understanding of the people around you rather than carrying around a ten-year-old version of someone who has continued to grow. Most relationships suffer from a slightly stale internal portrait. The eulogy exercise, repeated annually, keeps the portrait current. It is, in that way, less morbid than it sounds — it is partly a small contemplation of death and partly a useful tool for keeping the living people in your life visible to you as they actually are, not as they were when you first sketched them.

Keep the eulogy in a drawer rather than a folder on a screen. The drawer requires physical retrieval. The physical retrieval is part of the form. A document on a screen will be opened idly; a notebook in a drawer will be opened only when the mood asks for it. The form rewards the small inefficiency. Reach for the drawer twice a year, on dates only you remember. The exercise deepens when it costs a small effort to begin.