Eulogy for a Friend

You knew them differently

Family speaks from the inside of a history. A friend speaks from the inside of a choice. You knew their Tuesdays, their actual opinions, what they were like when no one needed them to be a son or a mother or a boss. If you have been asked to give the eulogy, it is because someone understood that a whole side of this person would go unrecorded without you.

So do not try to give the family's eulogy. Do not summarize the childhood you did not see or the marriage you only heard about. Give the testimony only you can give. Here is who they were when they were free. Rooms lean forward for that, because everyone in them, family most of all, is hungry to meet the parts they did not know.

Be generous with the specifics of the friendship itself, how you met, what you argued about for twenty years, what you never had to say out loud. The friendship is not a lens on the eulogy. It is the eulogy.

The worksheet

Answer quickly, in fragments. For a friend, the material is usually in the rituals and the private language, so the prompts go looking there.

Prompts for remembering them

• How did you meet? Tell it exactly, including the part you usually leave out.
• What was your ritual, the standing call, the usual table, the annual trip? Describe one instance of it in detail.
• What did they always say that no one at this funeral has heard yet? Write the exact words.
• What could you say to them that you could say to no one else?
• What did they do for you in your worst season, and did they ever mention it again?
• What were they like at midnight, or on hour six of a drive, when the polish wore off?
• What did you argue about forever, fondly, without resolution?
• What was their signature move, the thing everyone who loved them would recognize in one sentence?
• What did they love that they were slightly embarrassed to love?
• What is one story their family should finally hear, chosen with kindness?
• What did being their friend make you braver about?
• What will you do now on the days that belonged to them?

Calibrating the humor

Funny is allowed. For many friendships, funny is required, because laughter was the native language and the room needs to hear it one more time. A eulogy for a friend that never smiles can feel like a translation into a tongue they did not speak.

But the humor has to be loving, and it has to land soft. The test for every line is the front row. Picture their mother, their husband, their daughter hearing it. If the line would make the front row laugh through tears, keep it. If it would make them flinch, or if it needs the phrase they knew what I meant to survive, cut it without mourning. You will still be funny. You will just be funny inside the fence.

Tease the things they teased themselves about, the punctuality, the terrible parking, the eleven rehearsals of a toast. Never touch the things they were tender about, the divorce, the drinking, the body, the money. And follow every laugh with something true and warm, so the joke lands as love wearing a disguise, which is what it always was between you.

A full example, Theo

I met Theo in the second week of college, when he knocked on my door to ask if he could borrow a hammer. I did not have a hammer. Neither of us ever figured out why he thought I would. He stayed for four hours anyway. That was the whole friendship, really. Twenty-six years of staying anyway.

Family knows your history. Friends know your Tuesdays. I knew Theo's Tuesdays. I knew what he ordered before he said it, which songs he could not skip, and exactly how long he could hold a grudge, which was about nine minutes. I knew he practiced his toasts in the car, because he once left me a voicemail of one by accident. Yes, Sarah, the toast at your wedding. He rehearsed it eleven times. It was worth it.

He was terrible at goodbyes. He would stand up, announce, all right, I am leaving, and then talk in the doorway for forty-five minutes. I would give anything for one more doorway.

Here is the thing strangers should know about him. When my dad was dying, Theo drove up every single weekend. He never asked if I wanted company. He just brought sandwiches and sat with me through the worst months of my life and talked about nothing, beautifully, until nothing was exactly what I needed.

He never mentioned it afterward. He kept it off the record. So much of the best of him was off the record.

I am putting it on the record now, my friend. All right. I am leaving. But you know how long that takes me.

A full example, June

June and I were friends for forty-one years, which she would want me to point out is longer than most marriages. Including, she would add, two of hers.

I can say that. She would be furious if I did not.

We met at a terrible job neither of us was allowed to quit yet, and we survived it the way you survive anything, by finding the one other person who sees what you see. That was June's gift, and not only to me. She saw what you saw. You could catch her eye across any room in any decade and know you were not crazy.

Her family knew her as a sister, an aunt, and briefly and famously a wife. I knew her at midnight. I knew her in waiting rooms and parking lots. I knew her the year everything went wrong for me, when she showed up with a casserole she had absolutely bought and transferred into her own dish, and we never spoke of it, because comfort mattered more to her than credit. Almost nothing mattered more to June than making it look easy.

She was not easy. I want to be truthful in this room. She was stubborn, she was extravagant with other people's patience, and she was my first call with any news, good or bad, for four decades, because nobody on this earth was better at being on your side.

The phone company should lower a flag.

I do not know who I will tell things to now. I suppose I will keep telling her. Forty-one years is a habit, and I do not intend to break it.

Reading it aloud

A friend's eulogy lives close to conversation, so deliver it that way. Look up often. Find the other friends in the room, the ones who shared the table and the group chat, and speak some lines directly to them. They are your section of the choir, and their faces will steady you.

Watch your pace on the funny lines. Nerves make speakers rush jokes, and a rushed joke at a funeral dies twice. Say the line, then stop and let the room decide. The pause is what gives everyone permission to laugh in a sanctuary, and the laugh, when it comes, will be one of the kindest sounds of the day.

The hardest moment is usually the turn, the sentence where the jokes step aside and you say what the friendship was. Mark it on the page. Breathe before it. And have a backup reader among the friends, someone from the same table, because if you hand this eulogy to anyone, it should be someone who also knew their Tuesdays.