The Eulogy I Practiced in the Car
Forty minutes in the parking lot, teaching my voice not to break.
There is no rehearsal room for delivering a eulogy. Mine was a 2009 Honda in row C of a church parking lot, engine off, defroster losing its argument with the fog, forty minutes before they buried my father.
I had three pages, printed the night before at a copy shop because my printer chose that week to die, and the kid behind the counter had glanced at the first line and given me the smallest nod in the world, a nod that said, I read these all day, good luck, man. Three pages, double spaced, size fourteen font, because my uncle Ray had called me two nights earlier with the only piece of advice anyone gave me that worked.
“Print it big,” he said. “Your eyes are going to be swimming. And read it out loud until it stops meaning anything. Forty, fifty times. You have to wear the words smooth, like river stones. You can't skip them across the water while they still have edges.”
Uncle Ray drove a gravel truck for thirty years and has never read a poem on purpose in his life, and that is still the best writing advice I have ever received.
So I sat in row C and read my father's life out loud to a steering wheel.
The fog was the kind that sits down on a town and refuses to move, the kind my father would have called good fishing weather with zero evidence. I had the pages against the wheel and a fast food napkin on my knee for my eyes, and I started at the top, out loud, alone, feeling like an absolute lunatic. Born in 1951. Married my mother in a borrowed suit. Thirty-eight years at the plant. The first read, I got four sentences in... before my voice folded like a card table.
Here is what nobody tells you about the mechanics of it. Grief lives in specific words. Not the big ones. I could say devoted and beloved and worked hard all his life without a tremor, the funeral words, the words that fit any father. What wrecked me were the small ones. The sentence about how he kept every receipt for everything he ever bought, in shoeboxes, labeled in pencil. The sentence about his whistle, two notes, one up, one down, that meant dinner, or come hold this flashlight, or simply... where are you, and how I will spend the rest of my life listening for it in hardware stores.
Read twelve, I got through the receipts.
Read twenty, I got through the whistle.
By read thirty, something strange and merciful happened, the same thing that happens to any word you repeat too long: the sentences went smooth and slightly foreign, stones with the edges worn off, and I could pick each one up and set it down without bleeding on it.
My voice found a flat place to stand. I checked my face in the visor mirror, and a calm red-eyed man looked back. Forty minutes, maybe fifty reads... The fog never lifted. I walked into the church with three pages of river stones.
And it worked. That is the part I want on the record, for whoever is sitting in their own row C with the defroster on: Uncle Ray's method works. I stood up at that lectern in front of two hundred people, in the suit my father had seen me buy and pronounced too skinny in the leg, and I delivered every sad sentence flat and clear and true. The receipts. The whistle. The borrowed suit. My mother's face down in the front row, doing the thing where she holds her own hands. I laid the stones down one at a time and my voice did not break.
Then I reached the funny story.
Every eulogy needs one, everyone tells you that, and mine was the lawnmower, the summer my father fought a self-propelled mower that would not disengage, and got dragged, walking faster and faster, fully refusing to let go, across our yard and most of the neighbor's, shouting instructions back at us over his shoulder the whole way, as if we were the emergency. I had practiced it flat like everything else. I had worn it smooth.
But I had practiced it in an empty car... and there was one variable I could not rehearse.
They laughed.
Two hundred people laughed at once, and out of that laughter, half a second ahead of everyone, came my uncle Ray's laugh, and my uncle Ray's laugh is my father's laugh, the same bark, the same wheeze at the end of it, the same sound that came over the fence and out of fishing boats and across parking lots my whole life. It rolled up the aisle and hit me at the lectern, and my voice, which had survived the receipts and the whistle and my mother's folded hands, broke clean in half on the happiest sentence on the page.
I stood there for a moment in front of everyone, gripping three pages of river stones, and let it break. Somebody in the fourth row said, softly, “Take your time, son.” It was not even anyone I knew.
A eulogy is a letter to the one person who will never hear it, read aloud to everyone else.
I finished it.
Wet-faced, off script for the last paragraph, but I finished, and afterward at the reception, strangers held my elbow and told me it was beautiful, and Uncle Ray handed me a coffee and said, “You skipped one across the water at the end there,” and we both laughed his laugh, my father's laugh, the family laugh that now lives in one less chest.
Here is the ending nobody saw. When the hall was being folded up and stacked away, I went back out to the Honda in row C and sat with the pages one more time, and read the whole thing again, out loud, alone, to the steering wheel and the fog. Read fifty-one. No lectern, no rows of faces, no one to stay steady for. It was the worst read of the lot.
It was the only one that was actually for him.
That was three years ago. Since then I have learned that the practicing never really stops, it just changes rooms. I still write to him, letters he will not read, drafts about family and about the grief that showed up after the casseroles stopped, and last spring I did the thing he would have found hilarious and entered a poem about the lawnmower into a monthly poetry contest. It did not win. He would have kept the rejection email in a shoebox, labeled in pencil.
People ask if it gets easier to talk about him. Here is my honest answer: the sentences wear smooth, exactly like Ray promised. You can carry them anywhere now. They sit in your pocket, round and grey and quiet.
But every so often, in a crowded room, somebody laughs with a wheeze at the end of it.
No stone survives that. Nothing should.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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