Eulogy for a Mother

What children carry

Mothers are remembered in the body before they are remembered in words. Her footsteps in the hall, the smell of a particular soap, the exact pitch of your name called up a staircase. When you sit down to write, these sense memories will surface first and feel too small to say. They are not too small. They are the eulogy. The room does not need her resume. It needs to hear her stirring something, singing off key, calling everyone in for dinner.

You are also carrying things you may not have words for yet, the ways she shaped your instincts, the phrases of hers that come out of your own mouth. A mother's eulogy is partly a self-portrait, and that is not vanity. Standing up and saying I got this from her is one of the oldest forms of thanks there is.

If the relationship was complicated, and many are, you do not have to resolve it at the podium. Speak the true and loving things you can stand behind. Silence about the rest is not dishonesty. It is choosing the right room for each conversation.

The worksheet

Answer fast, in fragments, with a pen. You are collecting raw material, not writing yet. The prompts lean on the senses because that is where mothers live in memory.

Prompts for remembering her

• Close your eyes and hear her voice. What is she saying? Write the exact words.
• What did her hands do? What were they usually holding, folding, peeling, mending?
• Stand in her kitchen in your memory. What is on the stove, on the radio, taped to the refrigerator?
• What did she make that no one else can make, and who has tried?
• What did she do when you failed at something? Write the scene, not the moral.
• What did she worry about out loud, and what did she only worry about with her face?
• What did she repeat so often that everyone in this room could finish the sentence?
• When did you first see her as a person, separate from being your mother? What did you see?
• What did she want for you, in her own words if you ever heard them?
• What of hers do you catch yourself doing now, a phrase, a gesture, a stubbornness?
• What is one story about her that a stranger should hear?
• What would she be doing right now, in this room, if she could be here for it?

A full example, Ruth

My mother never sat down. I want to start there, because if you knew Ruth, you knew her standing. At the stove, at the sink, at the door with her coat half on because someone somewhere needed a ride. She was seventy-nine years old and I do not think I ever saw her rest without a task in her lap.

Her kitchen was the smallest room in the house and somehow the whole house lived in it. She fed everyone. Not because anyone asked. Because you were there, and being there meant you were hungry, and being hungry in Ruth's presence was a solvable problem. I have friends from the third grade who still talk about her soup.

When I failed the bar exam the first time, I called her from the parking lot. I could not get the words out. She listened to me breathe for a while and then she said, well, you will take it again in February, and what do you want for dinner. That was her whole philosophy. Failure was real, but so was dinner, and dinner was something she could do.

She was not soft in the way greeting cards mean it. She was soft the way good bread is soft, with a crust on it. She told the truth. She held grudges against exactly two people, and one of them was a weatherman.

I keep reaching for the phone to tell her about this week. She would want to know who came, and whether anyone got fed.

We got fed, Mom. For fifty-one years. We will spend the rest of our lives trying to pass it on.

A full example, Marisol

My mother sang while she cleaned. Badly, and with total commitment. If you called our house on a Saturday morning you would hear it before I said hello, and half of you did, and I know that because you told me this week, one after another, at the door of this church. Everyone has a Marisol soundtrack.

She raised three of us on a school secretary's salary, and I did not know we were poor until I was grown, because she was a magician with a coupon book and because shame was not a thing she kept in the house. What she kept was music, and plants she talked to, and other people's children, so many of other people's children, doing homework at our table like it was theirs. It was theirs. That was the point of the table.

When I dropped out of college she did not lecture me. She let me be quiet for three days, and then she came into my room with two cups of coffee and said, mija, tell me what you are afraid of. Not what happened. What I was afraid of. She always went straight to the real question.

The last thing she said to me was, water the tomatoes. I have been watering the tomatoes. They are ridiculous this year. They are climbing the fence like they know.

I do not know how to live in a world she is not singing in. But I know what she would tell me. She would say the song does not stop, you just have to carry the tune yourself now. So that is what we will do. Off key, and with total commitment.

Reading it aloud

A mother's eulogy is the one most likely to catch in the throat, because you are speaking in the voice she gave you. Plan for that. Print it large, double spaced, and mark a breath after every sentence that mentions food, her voice, or her hands. Those are the lines that reach up and grab the speaker. Knowing where they are lets you slow down before them instead of being ambushed.

Choose a backup reader, a sibling or a cousin who also loved her, and hand them a copy before the service. If you have siblings, consider a nod to them from the podium, one line that says this portrait is mine and theirs are just as true. It frees you from trying to speak for everyone, which is the weight that most often buckles a child at a mother's funeral.

And if you cry, cry. You are her child. The room expects nothing less, and it will hold you.