Day 24 - Eulogies

Content warning: mortality, death, the future, family.

(I may overstep a mark with todays piece. The rest of the week will be lighter and less of doom)

Dear listener, have you ever needed to give a speech at a wedding? I haven’t, and that’s alright by me. I could never be a bridesmaid and would hate to be the best man, for I am neither of those things. My gender is inadequate for either of these roles. Conveniently, no-one has ever called me even a best friend, so I don’t think I need to fear.

How about eulogies? Funeral orations for your family, friends or miscellaneous beloved? In the next zero to twenty-five years those may reasonably be required of me, and I think about it often, and think about the things I might say to sum up a life, and bury or cremate, and find the right way to praise, and be truthful about, someone you know well.

As a child I learnt one in three people will get cancer. I thought, well, that’s me or my brother or sister. I know that’s not how statistics work, but I always sort of expect it to bite one of us, ideally me, in some ways, though I’d rather not. To my knowledge, none of us got bit yet. But it comes to mind, and sometimes I find myself mentally flagging things people mention as, ‘ah, here’s a piece of music particularly close to them, or a place that comforts them’, and I feel sinister filing it as ‘in case they don’t lay out their own funeral plans’.

I worry a lot about my brother’s declining health. He had a heart attack when he was around my age, and seems to have a shrinking torso empty of everything except mysterious sickness, which remains inadequately tested and diagnosed. He may grow ever stronger and live to see the 22nd Century, but I’d be surprised. I think I have good reason to worry. Will I end up speaking on him? His life has been quite strange and quite veiled - but in a eulogy, you don’t talk in this wordy and flowery way. You have to be direct.

Outside the family he’s most known as Chong McBong, or as Gonad. I think about a crematorium filled with relatives, rather than his usual twitch streaming audience, and worry about his casket being horribly light. I know stories I could tell, and some of the right words. For some reason I imagine it’d fall to me, when and if the time comes.

My parents have both had cancer, my mum, of the breast, in 2004 when I’d just left home for university. She didn’t want to worry me, so downplayed the risk excessively. That was kind, but could have led to a nasty shock. My dad had prostate cancer far more recently. They both won. Hooray! But it made me more aware that funerals would one day come. If you’ve had covid, you’ll know how a disease, even a beaten disease, can make you older.

When I learnt my dad had cancer, I didn’t know how to respond, so that day I wrote a poem, but told no-one until now:

My dad's got the cancer
Cancer of the bum,
And when he dies
Of the stuff above the thighs
Well I wonder what'll happen to me mum.

My dad's got the cancer
Cancer up his rear.
Well he isn't very worried
Cos it's not exactly hurried
And he's trusting in a faith sincere

My dad's got the cancer
Cancer up inside his bottom
If this is his final night,
You know his soul'll be alright
Though his ar-soul and his body be forgottom.

Thankfully the poem was soon irrelevant, and doctors rectified the anus of Angus.

I’ve talked to my sister about parent funerals, and we have a general agreement. She’ll speak at mum’s funeral and I’ll speak at dad’s (but not necessarily in that order). That seems a fair balance, though I’m always open to changes. My sister is younger than me, and is the only person in the family whose eulogy I’ve never thought out and have never given thought to her funeral. I will pre-decease her, and she’ll inherit my house and go through all my vast wardrobes exclaiming ‘What the heck, Ben?!’ (if I’m still going by ‘Ben’ in that far-distant year), or ‘Gosh darn, what a load of excellent rubbish!’. (She works with children, so she minces her oaths.) I give her death no thought. I’m so confident I’ll beat her to the grave, that if I’m wrong I mean to be genuinely surprised by it. Like, gobsmacked.

I’ve been to a few funerals, mainly for the very elderly, as the youngest people I know that died didn’t think to invite me. I remember next to zero about any of the eulogies, but there are a few pointers I have in mind for writing them: if I give a eulogy at your funeral, dear listener, it will be about you and not about me. I think that’s the most important thing. It will be less about what you did, and more about who you were. It will be honest, and it won’t be entertaining unless it absolutely necessary. I’m not here to turn your burning into a Ben cabaret. It should be honest, not censored, dumbed down airbrushed, or photoshopped beyond recognition. It should be you, to remember, and as Jewish folk say, may your memory be a blessing.