I Wrote Her Eulogy on My Phone at Midnight
Autocorrect kept fixing her name, and I kept fixing it back.
My phone believed my best friend was a cat. Her name was Kat, with a K, and at midnight the night before her funeral, autocorrect kept quietly changing it, and I kept changing it back, and that was the entire war: my thumb against a piece of glass that had never met her.
Kat died on a Sunday.
Thirty four years old, an artery in her brain that nobody knew about deciding, without consulting anyone, that it was finished. There was no long illness... no chance to say the things. There was a phone call from her sister that I answered while holding a bag of oranges, and I remember the oranges because I stood in the parking lot holding them for twenty minutes, as if putting them down would make it true.
Eleven days later, her mother called me. You knew her best, she said. You will speak. You write those little poems, you will know what to say. I said yes, of course, absolutely... and then did not write one single word for six days.
Which is how I ended up at my kitchen table at midnight before the funeral, laptop untouched in the other room because opening it felt like homework, typing her eulogy into the notes app on my phone, between a grocery list and a password I should not be keeping in a notes app. Eleven percent battery. No charger in sight. It felt correct. Kat ran her whole life at eleven percent and made it everywhere she needed to be.
I tried to start the way you are supposed to. I searched writing a eulogy for a friend and read the advice with my thumb over my mouth. Share a treasured memory. Keep it brief. Speak from the heart. As if the heart at midnight speaks in anything but static.
Every opening I typed was a lie wearing a suit. Kat was a light. Delete. Kat touched everyone she met. Delete. She would have gagged. This was a woman who once left a wedding reception early because the toasts were, her word, fraudulent.
So I did the only thing left. I opened our text thread and started scrolling up. Eleven years. The phone grew warm in my hand like something alive. Voice memos of her singing wrong lyrics on purpose. A photograph of a seagull she swore was judging her. Nine thousand messages about nothing, which is to say, about everything.
Somewhere in a March four years back, I found it.
We had just come home from a coworker's funeral, one of those stiff services where a chaplain who never met the man kept calling him Robert when everyone alive called him Bobby. At one in the morning, Kat had texted me: instructions for mine, since apparently we die now. Tell the ferry story. Do not let anyone say I lit up a room. If my cousin tries to sing, stop him. Cry if you want, I plan to be beyond embarrassment. And then, a minute later: you have to be the one who speaks. you are the only one who will not make me sound like a brochure.
I sat at my kitchen table and laughed out loud, alone, at midnight, at ten percent battery, because she had done it again... Four years ahead of me. Kat was never on time for anything in her life except this.
You do not write a eulogy for a friend. You take dictation from a decade of her voice in your head.
After that it was not writing.
It was obeying.
The ferry story went in first, the way she ordered: the time we took the wrong ferry on purpose of an argument about whether it was the wrong ferry, and ended up on an island with one restaurant that had closed its kitchen at eight. Kat talked the owner into letting her cook. She made scrambled eggs at ten at night for six strangers and made everyone at the counter exchange phone numbers like it was the last day of summer camp. We missed the final boat back. She called it the best mistake of my life, and she said it while looking at me, and I have never told anyone that part until now.
I typed her name wrong and right and wrong again the whole way through. Autocorrect kept fixing Kat to cat, and I kept fixing it back, and somewhere around the fortieth correction it stopped being infuriating and started being company. One more stubborn thing in the world that had not yet updated itself to her absence. Me neither, I thought... Me neither.
I finished at 2:40 in the morning at four percent, and I did not read it over, because she had also once texted me, about a poem I was strangling with revisions: stop fixing it, you coward, it was done an hour ago.
I read the eulogy from my phone at the podium. Her mother said that was fine, that Kat would have found a printed speech suspicious. I told the room she had left instructions, and the room laughed, and then I read her texts out loud, and forty people made the wet kind of laugh at do not let anyone say I lit up a room, because every single one of us had been about to.
Her cousin did try to sing. He got as far as standing up and inhaling before her mother turned around in the front pew with a look I can only describe as inherited. He sat back down. Kat had layers of contingency in that family, defenses she had built years deep, and even dead she was still winning arguments.
I told the ferry story. I cried. She said I could.
For months afterward I kept typing into our thread, messages with no destination, updates on people she would want gossip about. A therapist would call it continuing bonds. I called it texting the dark. Eventually I started folding those unsent messages into small poems about memory and grief, and once, on the worst night, about the loneliness itself, the specific kind that comes from having a joke ready and nowhere to send it. Writing to her turned into writing about her, which turned, very slowly, into writing again.
And here is the part I cannot explain to anyone who has not lost their person. Sometime that spring, my phone finally learned her. I typed Kat and the machine just let the name stand there, no correction, no fight... Then it went further. It started offering her to me, up in the little predictive bar, every time I typed the letter K. Kat. Kat. Kat. Her name, waiting above the keyboard, wanting to be chosen.
I never swipe it away.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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