Eulogy or Elegy?

 

(photo by Marcia)

 

Funerals tend to be more elegy than eulogy, lamenting the dead rather than celebrating the person’s life as we send them off into the Ever Forever After with a toast and a hearty cheer. 

 

It’s probably a matter of timing. If a funeral happens right after someone has died, we are overwhelmed by feelings of loss, and we’re trying to corral enough positivity and joy to offset our pain. A memorial service held later in the year allows us to remember the person’s entire life. Three weeks after my wife’s unexpected death, I thought I could give Evelyn’s eulogy, but the shock of her unexpected death was still too fresh and raw, and my friend Daniel graciously read my words.

 

Most of us dream of someone delivering an amazing eulogy at our funeral, although a few of us would prefer an elegy, wanting to be mourned with great wailing and rivers of tears rather than celebrated. We won’t hear any of their words, of course, unless they rehearse them with us ahead of time, but it’s comforting to think that someone will remind everyone how amazing we were, with a few words about one of our mistakes to keep it believable.

 

We have lost our language for speaking eloquently and intelligently about death.

 

If you are delivering a eulogy, don’t dwell on the person’s last days or weeks. If they were old and rather feeble, we want to remember who they were at the physical and mental peaks of their life, how they loved to dance or sing, or overcame a rough childhood or a physical challenge to become the person we called our friend. Eulogies shouldn’t be restricted to what they did, or the awards they won, because this isn’t the essence of who they were. 

 

We want to remind people that the person who died had a host of experiences and adventures throughout their life, like being a soccer player in college or a sailor on Puget Sound. Talk about what formed the person we came to love. You will probably share stories that not everyone knows. This will breathe life back into them for a moment, and make us glad that we took the time to know them.

 

Once we accept that death is properly a part of life, then we don’t have to fight the philosophical “why” when good, talented, and compassionate people die early. Sometimes, people just die for no discernable reason. 

 

‘Grief is as small and infinite as stars.’ - Julie H Lemay

 

Mention what they did for others, and what you will miss most about them. You can say why this death should matter to all of us, and how we can keep their presence and words alive in our hearts. If the only thing they did in life was make a ton of money, and they had few friends, then you’re probably speaking to a small audience, and regret may be one of your themes. If it’s a child who died, we want to affirm that who they would have become was already present in who they were.

 

Every death is a tragedy for those who loved that person, even if the rest of the world doesn’t notice. But when someone dies young, or out of sequence, or when they were just starting off in their chosen profession, then a layer of bitterness is added in. Besides losing this person, we also grieve the loss of everything they were about to accomplish with their insights and skills, and we mourn not being able to see them blossom. 

 

If you belong to a faith community, affirm its beliefs about death and the afterlife, but talk also about the suffering that the family and close friends are feeling. Talk about how the community can translate its faith into compassion and support for those who are grieving as they navigate their way through and adjust to life without the physical presence of the one who died. 

 

As we get older, friends and family begin to die with increasing regularity—some from natural causes and old age, but also from household accidents, cancer, heart attacks, and acts of violence, and if we weren’t aware of this before, we realize just how fragile life really is, and we’re amazed that any of us survived our teenage years. This existential uncertainty can unnerve us so much that we wake up every morning wondering who has died overnight. Every ache, cough, and tick of our body may also make us think that something is seriously wrong with us and it’s only a matter of days before we’re gone, and some of us will be right.

 

Perhaps the Irish wake is best for both mourning and celebrating a person, with hours of sharing stories and emotions loosened by a few drinks. If we truly loved the person, then we want to remember them as they were—a mixture of nobility, pride, selfishness, compassion, stubbornness, wit, aspirations, failures and grand dreams—because we know this to be the truth about ourselves.

 

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We don’t have to deliver our eulogies in words. We can be creative with the raw elements of our emotions as a way of expressing our grief. Arvo Pärt created the music of Cantus to eulogize Benjamin Britten.

 

After the deaths of his father and his son, Franz Liszt found that the musical language he had been taught wasn’t able to express the depths of his emotions. According to Kevin LeVine, Liszt began to experiment by using chromatically dissonant textures, harmonies based on whole tone, bitonality, and musical impressionism that would later be expanded by Debussy and Ravel. His music grew darker, but also freer, and by doing so, he was able to express his grief in a way that spoke to the next generation of listeners and musicians.

 

If we don’t compose music, we can create paintings or sculptures to express our grief. We can push on the boundaries of language and find new ways of expressing grief through writing. By being creative, we change the destructive energies of death and despair into what brings life and hope back into the world.