Eulogy Examples

For those of you who came up through the church with us, you will already know about the lists. Mum was a list-maker. Shopping lists, to-do lists, lists of things she had read and wanted to remember, lists of things she thought we needed to know before we left home. When we were clearing the kitchen last week, we found a notepad on the counter with three items on it: return library book, ring the plumber, be grateful.

She would have said that was not a list. She would have said it was just a reminder. I think it was the most her thing I have ever found.

Dad always said that if you wanted to know what something was worth, you should ask Mum. She had no patience for sentiment that was not earned and a very low tolerance for fuss. What she did have, in enormous supply, was this: the ability to notice what people actually needed rather than what they said they needed, and then to quietly provide it, usually before you had finished asking.

She was sixty-seven years old and she spent most of them in that mode. Watching, thinking, getting on with it.

I have been trying to work out what I want you to remember about Ann. There is too much to say, so I have been narrowing it down, and what I keep coming back to is this: she was funnier than she let on.

She had what I would call a dry northern regard for anything that took itself too seriously, which included me, fairly often. She delivered observations with complete seriousness, right at the point where you were least expecting them. I married her in 1987 at the register office in Leeds because she said the church would be full of people she would have to talk to, and talking to that many people would exhaust her before the reception started. This was accurate. We were married for thirty-six years.

She was from Harrogate originally, which she felt obliged to mention when any talk turned to standards. She trained as a nurse, worked for twenty years in the transplant unit at Leeds General, and retired early when her mum needed her. She said the hospital could manage without her. The hospital mostly could not. They still ring me to ask if she left any notes.

She made everything work. The kind of person who does that quietly, so that you only notice the system when it is gone.

I want to start with the thing everyone in this room knows but nobody says: James was difficult. He was difficult from the start. He was the kind of person who would argue with a sign, and he would usually be right. He had strong opinions on everything and the patience to defend them for much longer than was strictly social. He had no small talk. He found small talk a kind of waste of something that could be better.

He was also the best person I have ever known. I am aware those two sentences are sitting next to each other and they should be, because they are both completely true.

He was forty-four years old. He spent those years doing exactly what he wanted to do, which included: running a small carpentry business out of a shed he had converted himself, refusing every job he thought was beneath him and several he could have done well, reading anything he could get his hands on, arguing with the radio, and being the kind of older brother who did not suffer nonsense from me or anyone else, and who showed up anyway, every single time, without being asked.

That is the part I want you to know. He was difficult. And he showed up.

They say you get a handful of real friends in a lifetime, if you are lucky. People who knew you before you knew yourself and who kept knowing you all the way through, through the versions of yourself you have been proud of and the ones you would rather forget.

Diane was mine. We met at the age of eleven on the first day of secondary school, assigned to sit next to each other in a classroom, and that was that. Fifty-one years.

She was the person I rang on the morning my dad died, at half past two in the morning, and she answered on the second ring. She did not make it a thing. She just answered. That is who she was. Available, without the drama of being available. Kind, without the performance of it.

She worked as a secondary school teacher for thirty-two years, which I think is the most demanding job I have ever watched anyone do, and she was brilliant at it. Not because she was easy on them, she was not, but because she took them seriously. She always said that teenagers know when an adult is going through the motions, and they never forgive you for it. She never went through the motions.