The Eulogy My Mother Already Wrote
Nobody clapped, because you do not clap at a funeral in Trinity Lutheran, but I felt the room’s hands on me anyway, the way a congregation holds a person up without ever once touching her.
Aunt Bev caught me in the narthex on the way out to the fellowship hall and held my face in both her hands the way she has done since I was a little girl in pigtails.
“That’s exactly who she was,” Bev said, her eyes wet but her voice steady. “Ordinary and true. You gave her the only eulogy that was ever going to fit her, Diane. Greg gave the church his grief. You gave them your mother.”
Ruthie Hovde stopped me by the coat rack a few minutes later, a woman I had known since grade school, and she did not say anything grand either, just squeezed my arm and said, “We all knew it was you, honey. We just didn’t know how much until just now.” That was the thing about a town like ours. People already suspect the truth, mostly. They are just waiting for somebody brave enough, or tired enough, or honest enough, to finally say it out loud where everybody can hear.
Greg found me afterward at the luncheon, out by the coffee urns I had filled myself that morning, while half the church was still working through the ham and the scalloped potatoes three different women had brought without checking with each other, the way it always happens.
“I didn’t know about the notebook,” he said. His voice had gone thin, the way a man’s voice goes when he has been holding something in for an entire service and it is finally starting to leak out the sides. “I didn’t know she wrote like that. About you. I didn’t know any of it.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said. “That’s sort of the whole point of a notebook, Greg. Nobody knows what’s in it until somebody reads it.”
He looked down at his coffee cup like it might have an answer written on the side of it. “I should have called more. I meant to. Every week I meant to, and then the week would be over.”
“I know.” And I did know. I had watched him mean to for four years.
“I’m not asking you to say it’s all right,” he said.
“It’s not all right,” I told him, and I said it plain, the way our mother would have, not loud, not sharp, just true. “But it’s done now, and she’s gone, and you and I are the only two people left who remember what that kitchen smelled like on a Sunday. I don’t want to spend what’s left of my life being angry at the only other person who remembers that.”