The Eulogy My Mother Already Wrote
Mr. Lahti had the service order open on his desk, a plain blue folder with a legal pad clipped inside it, and my brother Greg leaned over that legal pad like he was signing for a car.
“I’ll give the eulogy,” Greg said. “Diane can sit with the grandkids.”
He said it the way you’d tell someone which door to use. Not cruel exactly. Just certain. The kind of certain a man gets when he has decided something in the car on the way over and does not expect anyone to have a different idea.
Mr. Lahti wrote it down without looking up. That is the thing about funeral directors in a town like ours. They have learned not to referee a family in front of them. They just write down what the loudest voice says and let the family sort out later whether it was true.
I sat in the chair across the desk with my hands folded in my lap, and I did not say one word. Not about the four years. Not about the mornings. Not about anything.
I want to tell you why, because if you knew my mother you would expect me to have something to say, and I did. I had plenty to say. I did not say it because a funeral home on a Thursday afternoon, two days before we buried our mother, was not the place to fight my brother in front of a man who had known our family since before I was born. Mama raised us better than that, even now, even with her gone three days. So I let Greg have his line on the legal pad, and I asked Mr. Lahti one small thing of my own.
“Could I read something short, after his eulogy. Just a page or two.”
“Of course, Diane,” he said, and he wrote that down too, right under Greg’s name, like it was nothing. Like it was not going to be the only thing anyone remembered about that Saturday.
Greg did not even ask what I meant to read. He was already looking at his phone.
My mother’s name was Fern Oleson Resch, and she had lived in Kettle Lake, Wisconsin, for all of her eighty-one years except for two of them in Milwaukee when she was a young bride, which she always said felt like a sentence she served and was glad to finish. She had a laugh that came out before she meant it to, and she wrote everything down. Everything. Grocery lists, church committee notes, the exact date each grandchild lost a tooth. If you wanted to know when it snowed in 1987, you could go find the notebook.