The Toughest Eulogy

Balancing Honesty and Respect

I was 11 years old when I first experienced death. My mother’s parents had driven up to Kentucky for a visit, and the next afternoon, my grandfather said he wasn’t feeling well and went to lie down. An hour later, he was dead.

Until then, I had rarely seen my mother or grandmother cry, but there were plenty of tears before, during, and after his funeral. And like most kids, I saw the service and burial as the responsibility of adults. It never crossed my mind that one day I would be part of organizing a funeral, much less speaking at one.

That changed in January 2000 when my mother died after a long battle with cancer (she actually died from complications related to her treatment, but that’s another story). My love for my mother compelled me to speak at her funeral. It was difficult to get through the eulogy I had written, but I made it. And during the following years, I was glad I did—it became part of my grieving process. I have spoken at other funerals, especially those of my grandmothers.

In a world full of second chances, death is a profoundly sudden stop. Confronting a permanent end has far-reaching effects. Writing a eulogy and presenting it is my way of saying death doesn’t have the last word—I do—and in the face of devastating loss, I will find the strength to honor the person and the memories we shared.

The eulogy a parent gives for a child is undoubtedly the most agonizing. Far more common, however, is eulogizing someone with whom you’ve had a difficult relationship. That day eventually came for me as well. My father died in April 2022 after struggling with dementia for several years. We had a difficult relationship throughout most of my life. He wasn’t the father I wanted him to be, and I clearly wasn’t the son he wanted me to be either. Although we had overcome a major falling out after my mother died (that, too, is another story) and had many good years before he died, the majority of our relationship had been fraught.

As with other family members, I was committed to speaking at his funeral, but being honest yet respectful would require threading a needle with words. I searched online for advice and found little that was helpful. Conventional wisdom suggests adhering to Thumper’s Rule: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all” (sage advice from a cottontail rabbit in the 1942 animated film Bambi, which my mother would occasionally cite when I was a child). It had been relatively easy to eulogize loved ones whose unconditional love and fond memories defined our relationships compared with combing through a nearly 60-year relationship with my father, much of which was dominated by chronic frustration and disappointment.

But my grieving process motivated me to say something, and I was committed to honoring both of us. The challenge was figuring out how to assemble a collection of facts and stories about him and me—good and bad—and put them in a context that would invite others to better understand and appreciate our relationship. And then say my final goodbye. If that sounds like a tall order, it was.

Parts of it were fairly straightforward: talking about my father’s early years living in a sharecropper’s shack in southern Mississippi, the unlikely and life-altering accomplishment of he and my mother earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in the 1950s, his engineering career, and working together around the house. The harder parts were describing the connective tissue of our relationship that produced pivotal moments or that led to unexpected outcomes.

Here is an excerpt from my eulogy:

The week my father died, I was talking with my son, Nathan, and told him I had observed that people who make big socio-economic leaps within a single generation do not arrive at their new station in life as well-rounded people. Their drive to achieve stellar success in one area (such as business) seems to atrophy other areas (such as interpersonal relationships or parenting).

Dad’s myopic determination to make something of himself, in other ways, made him rigid and fragile: criticism too easily cut him to the quick; he was overly focused on productivity rather than people; and he didn’t operate or appreciate things on an emotional level. He was an authoritarian and a disciplinarian.

My relationship with my father was the most difficult relationship in my life, especially when I was younger, and needed him to be the kind of Dad every little boy wants. I suffered through his inability or unwillingness to rise to the occasion. By my late teens, I had to confront and reconcile my woundedness if I was to go on living. I succeeded. I got healthier, but Dad never joined me on that journey. The gap between reality and possibility left a permanent void in our relationship, but he and I discovered a way to bridge part of it.

Starting at a young age, working with Dad around the house was a duty, not a choice. But as I grew older, I eventually realized it was neutral ground, a safe haven. When we worked together on a project, it gave us something to focus on besides each other. He was less of a failure to me, and I felt like less of a disappointment to him. Working together created unity of purpose. Partnering to repair and improve a broken world was always a hopeful endeavor.

When addressing difficult topics, I intentionally sought to strike a balance between stating things outright and alluding to them. For example, the third paragraph above suggests a life-threatening situation, which is true. I chose not to share that I suffered from a severe, suicidal depression in my mid-to-late teens. It wasn’t entirely my father’s fault, though he played a critical role in it. Fortunately, I found a good therapist (whom he paid for) and came out the other side. Despite my father’s claim that he could benefit from counseling, he never went. His passive refusal to grow emotionally was painful for me. But I gradually came to accept his limitations and focused instead on working together, which was the most functional aspect of our relationship.

The mere implication of a darker history felt very provocative at the time, let alone exposing family secrets and their damaging effects on me. But I did so with a velvet glove. During the past few years, when I’ve occasionally listened to the audio recording of the service, my words weren’t as raw and daring as I recalled them sounding the day of his funeral. That’s good, and perhaps most important, I don’t regret anything I said or chose not to say.

I concluded my father’s eulogy with a lengthy comment I had written in response to a friend’s Facebook post about her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s. I rarely post comments on social media, but as I wrote that one—more than a year before my father passed—I knew I was giving voice to how his deterioration was impacting him, and my sister, brother, and me. I’m glad I saved it, and it was a fitting way to describe his final years.

At my father’s funeral, my siblings and I had decided to let the grandchildren speak first, followed by my sister providing an overview of my father’s life. It was all positive, and somewhere during all that—for a second or two—I considered not speaking at all, knowing what I was planning to say was grittier and less complimentary. But I had worked so hard on it, and I was committed to sharing my experiences with him.

Grief has a way of overwhelming the senses. It’s difficult to stay in the moment, to plan ahead, or remember what you’re supposed to do. After delivering my eulogy, I sat back down next to my wife, and then it occurred to me that, after all I had said, no one would probably speak to me in the church lobby afterward.

When the service ended, and our family walked into the lobby, I stood there for about a minute before a string of 50+ year-old men came up to me and essentially said, “Thank you for telling the truth about our fathers.”

I didn’t see that coming, and nothing I had said was intended to elicit a particular response from anyone. What I said was for me. Saying it in public was my way of not letting death have the final word and helping me see and remember the good in light of the bad. However, learning that my eulogy had touched other men and spoken to the hurt and disconnection they had experienced with their own fathers was an unexpected gift.

I wanted to share my journey through this endeavor to encourage those struggling with a tough eulogy. Composing the right words that honestly speak to your experience without bashing your loved one is a hard line to walk. But I believe it’s worth the effort. It took me nearly three weeks to arrive at a version of my eulogy that felt truthful and balanced. Tempting as it may be, I doubt AI can craft a eulogy that reveals your heart. Wrestling with your emotions and memories is a big part of what gives the process of writing a eulogy its cathartic power, and nothing can substitute for delivering it in person before family and friends.

We all say goodbye in our own ways. Eulogies are one of many. Funerals are short, losses are long. You don’t get a second chance to deliver a eulogy. It’s a moment in time, and then it’s gone … forever. Perhaps my eulogizing is as much about wanting to have my say as it is about resisting the permanence of death. Funerals are for the living, and life goes on. It’s up to each of us to make peace with the past. Offering a eulogy helps me grieve … the loss of my loved one, the possibilities that will never be realized, and the version of myself their death took from me.

There’s nothing wrong with emphasizing good things at funerals or saying “nothing at all.” But some of us need to articulate a fuller truth that testifies to the realities of relationships forged by love and longing, blessings and regrets, fond reflections, and heartfelt disappointments. The tough eulogy is not a platform for airing grievances, but a process for grieving authentically; for honoring your loved one and being true to yourself.