The Eulogy My Mother Already Wrote
“Is there anyone else who would like to share a word about Fern?”
My legs did not feel entirely like mine when I stood up. I had the notebook in my hand, and I walked up the center aisle past the casket banked in white carnations, the kind Mama always said looked like a wedding instead of a funeral, which used to make her laugh. Greg was still up at the front, not yet back in his seat, and for one second our eyes met, and he looked at me the way he used to look at me when we were ten and seven and he already knew, somehow, before Mama even came around the corner, that he was in trouble.
I did not stop to say anything to him. I walked past him to the small lectern and set the notebook down and opened it to the first page.
“My mother wrote a list every single day for the last four years,” I said. “I’m just going to read you a few.”
I read the first one. Milk. Eggs. Call about the furnace filter. A soft laugh moved through the pews, warm, the kind of laugh you give when you recognize somebody exactly. Mama always did write her lists like that, no commas, nothing crossed out, just one thing after another the way her mind ran.
I turned the page. Cottage cheese, small curd. Stamps. Ask Diane if her Mason has his tooth yet. Another laugh, softer, because half that church remembered my grandson losing that tooth at the Fourth of July picnic two summers back, and remembered Mama asking everyone about it for a week.
I kept turning pages. The handwriting got smaller as the notebook went on, more careful, the letters leaning harder on each other, because her hand was tiring faster by the second year, the third, the last one. But she had still written one every single day. Even on the mornings she could barely hold the pen, even on the morning before the morning I found her not breathing right in that same kitchen chair, she had written her list.
I read the lines underneath. Diane, thank you for not making me feel like trouble. I read: Tell Greg I’m not mad, I just miss the boy he used to be, who called just to talk and not just on my birthday. I had never shown him that one. I was not reading it to shame him. I was reading it because it was true, and because my mother had written it down for someone to say out loud someday, and today was the day.