The Eulogy My Mother Already Wrote
Saturday came in gray and cold, the kind of October morning in Wisconsin where the sky looks like it has already decided on winter and is just waiting for the calendar to catch up. I got to the church early to help set up the fellowship hall for the luncheon after, because that is what you do in a town like ours, you do not hire it out if you have hands and a reason to use them.
Aunt Bev found me in the church kitchen, elbow deep in a sink of coffee urns. She is my mother’s younger sister, seventy-four and sharp as a tack, and she had known exactly what Greg said in Mr. Lahti’s office within about four hours of it happening, because that is also how a town like ours works.
“You hold onto that notebook,” she said. She did not ask if I had it. She knew I had it.
“I will.”
“He doesn’t mean to be the way he is,” Bev said, drying her hands on a dish towel that said WORLD’S BEST GRANDMA on it, which had been a gift to my mother some Christmas or other and had simply lived in that church kitchen drawer for years, the way things do. “Grief makes some people loud in the wrong direction. Your mother knew that about him. She loved him anyway. You don’t have to make him small today. You just have to let people see what’s true.”
I had the notebook in my coat pocket, soft at the corners from four years of being carried in and out of my mother’s kitchen. I patted it once, the way you’d check for your keys, and I went out to find my seat.
My husband Warren was already in the pew, holding my spot with his hat on his knee. He had wanted to say something to Greg himself, out in the parking lot the night before, man to man, and I had asked him not to.
“He’s not worth you starting something over,” I told him, “and neither am I. Let me handle my own brother.”
Warren did not love that answer, but he nodded, because thirty-one years of marriage teaches a man which hills are his wife’s to climb. He reached over and took my hand once I sat down, and he kept it the whole first half of the service, and that was its own kind of standing up, even if it never got loud enough for anyone else to notice.
Greg stood up first. We had not planned the order that way exactly, Mr. Lahti had, writing names on a legal pad in the order they were given to him, but it felt, sitting there, like Greg had arranged the whole morning around going first and leaving nothing behind him worth following.