The Eulogy My Mother Already Wrote
He talked for twelve minutes. I know because I watched the clock on the back wall of Trinity Lutheran, the one that has hung there since before either of us was born, its hands a little crooked, always five minutes slow no matter who adjusted it.
He talked about growing up on County Road A, about the smell of Mama’s kitchen on a Sunday, about a fishing trip with our father that had nothing to do with our mother at all. He told one long story about driving up for her seventy-fifth birthday and how she had cried when he walked in the door, and how that memory had stayed with him ever since as proof, he said, that she always knew how much he loved her even from a distance. He talked about how busy work had kept him, how the drive felt longer every year, how he wished, he said this part twice, he wished he had called more. He wished he had come home more. He said the word wish so many times it started to sound like a word from a different language, one that meant something closer to sorry but was easier to say out loud in church.
He did not say my name. Not once, in twelve minutes. He did not say that someone had measured out Mama’s pills for four years running, or washed her hair over a kitchen sink, or sat with her through the appointments where the doctor’s voice got quieter each time. He talked about our mother’s life, but somehow never once mentioned who had actually been living beside it for the last four years of it.
I do not think he did it on purpose. I want to be fair about that, because it matters, and because my mother would have wanted me to be fair about it even today. I think Greg stood up there and told the truest story he knew how to tell, and the truest story he knew was his own regret, because regret was the only thing he’d actually been living with. Guilt is a strange editor. It cuts out everyone but the guilty.
The church got quiet in a particular way while he talked. Not an angry quiet. A noticing quiet. I felt Ruthie Hovde, three rows up, shift in her seat the way a person does when a story is missing a piece they know is supposed to be there. I felt Aunt Bev’s hand land flat between my shoulder blades, not pushing, just resting there, like she was holding something still.
Greg sat back down. Pastor Halvorsen rose and looked out over the pews, the way he does at the end of the family remarks, the question he asks at every funeral he has ever run in that church.