When he was a student, this writer peddled paeans from his dorm room.
Nan was dead. Of that, no confirmation was needed – mouth hanging open in one final gasp; eyes short of a destination, ceasing to wander. I was 19 at the time, and in that moment, I kissed her cold forehead goodbye.
I’d loved my nan – well, great-nan – but this wasn’t her. This was a body, a retired vehicle of tea and toast production, and nobody quite knew what to say next. Being nearly a whole year into university – the first member of my family to ever go – ‘what to say next’ fell to me. ‘You’re good with words, Alex,’ one relative chided, in the same tone you’d use to goad someone into fixing your kitchen cabinet. I was assigned the eulogy.
A eulogy is essentially just a polite rewrite of someone’s life, with their missteps, prejudices and prior convictions rebranded as pops of colour in their once-effervescent personalities. Bad habits become calling cards – ‘God, she loved a scotch and soda!’ – and ribald tales from work, home and holiday displace the humdrum rhythms of ordinary life when tallying one’s cosmic lot.
My nan wasn’t the kind of person who left a trail of anecdotes in her wake. She hadn’t really left much body in her wake, either. Physically, she was a tiny lady. Wrapped in her beige shawl and cradled by timber, she looked, I thought on my way up to the altar, like Yoda.
I worked with what I had. ‘Despite being half-blind, her eyes twinkled,’ I started. ‘She had no teeth, yet her smile lit up rooms, and though her voice rattled with the endless cigarettes that had diffused into the wallpaper, she had a contagious laugh.’
I felt I’d done her proud, tucking my piece of paper back into the breast pocket of my grey Next suit before slotting back into the pews beside my bleary-eyed dad. Despite really trying to give it some vigour in the final lines, it was hard to read the room to get a measure of my performance as I looked out onto a sea of pale grimaces and clenched jaws, occasionally punctuated by the odd sniffle from a snotty-nosed distant relative. It was only at the burial that I was told how much I had – and there is no better term for this – smashed it.
By the graveside, the vicar put her arm around me and congratulated me on what I’d written. ‘It’s deeply impressive. Perfect, even,’ she told me. This was not to be my last interaction with the vicar, who to this day I recall in my mind’s eye as not just looking like, but being Dawn French (editor’s note: Ms French has no formal ordained role with the Church of England). Mourners ebbed away from the graveside as rain began rap-tapping the coffin lid, right on cue. I looked ahead and saw the Edwardian schoolhouse my nan had attended in the 1920s. Ultimately, she’d only really moved 100 feet in her life.
At the wake everyone was awkward and, would you believe it, morose. A bald cousin with an avocado torso flicked through the rows of finger sandwiches as if searching through a filing cabinet. As he did so, he told me a story about getting hit in the head with a golf ball. He was interrupted as another older relative tapped me on the shoulder.
‘Alec, it is Alec is it? I wanted to get your number. When I go, will you do mine?’
Later, another.
‘Hello dear, I thought that was tremendously good, what you wrote. Did you do it all yourself? If so, can I have your number?’
I was flattered, I was in-demand. Over and over, friends and associates of my dearly-departed nan gave me insider tips on their own relatives’ mortality, telling me their mother was ‘circling the drain’ and that they may need my number for just the right moment.
Back in my university halls a fortnight later, my phone was buzzing and beeping in the spirit of so many teenage bedroom entrepreneurs, except while others might be shifting button-baggies of low-grade skunk from their crappy Nokias, I was trading in tributes.
‘Mum was obsessed with baking,’ one woman told me over the phone on a day when I should’ve been working, ‘though, it was never about making the sultana cake, it was about sharing it with all of us.’ It didn’t occur to me to charge money until the vicar suggested it. She’d said by the graveside that she could put me in touch with people who may want some help, before adding, gnomically, ‘we could agree a fee for you?’ And just like that, the local priest had become my agent, a Colonel Tom Parker to my prematurely ropey young Elvis.
The work wasn’t without its challenges. Typically, I’d never meet the bereaved, I’d just get an email or phone call with a smattering of information. ‘Not the easiest person,’ cropped up a couple of times, which, when translated, means everything you’d expect it to. That said, I was good at finding the little things – the quirks, the oddities, the overlooked details that make someone who they are. At university I’d tell people about my part-time job. Friends would talk about working in pubs, clubs and Aldi. In comparison, ‘I write eulogies,’ was mostly a conversation stopper, really. Like saying you collect dolls.
However, one eulogy changed things. By then, I had a few under my belt, but this was my first for someone I didn’t sort-of know. I’m standing at the front door of a small cottage with the Colonel, in her full vicar get-up. The buzzer whines and a figure wrenches the misted front door open.
A man with a cane shuffles to the door. ‘Are you Amazon?’ he asks.
‘No, Alex.’ I say. ‘And this is the vicar.’
‘Come in, come in,’ he says, as he retreats into the darkness. Arthur is completely blind and his brother died two weeks ago. He makes two perfect cups of tea – fair play – and sits down in an armchair. All the lights are off in the house. It had never occurred to me that some visually impaired people wouldn’t turn them on. On the windowsill, there’s a framed photograph of him and his brother in grey school jumpers. The vicar visibly catches him off-guard by asking for some sweetener in her tea. Arthur stands and gently taps his stick along the route back to the kitchen, like the morse code for ‘Where the fuck did I put the sugar?’
He returns and sits again. ‘Eddie was my best friend,’ he says slowly. He tells me he has been blind from birth, but Eddie had helped him from the beginning. In return, Arthur had cared for Eddie in the end. But now Eddie had gone, Arthur was left alone. Soon it was dark inside and out.
The vicar is sitting next to me. She isn’t listening, and Arthur knows that. The sofa has broken springs and as he speaks, we’re both gently digested by beige cushions. It is the truly bleakest part of winter, post-Christmas, and the lamppost outside casts golden light across the floor, illuminating Eddie’s slippers. I’m too polite to interrupt or say anything, and for all I know, the vicar is asleep.
Arthur describes how Eddie would involve him in childhood football games, guiding him with his arms, and making him feel included. They’d watch Stingray together and Eddie would narrate the supermarionation to his brother. It didn’t feel like a chore, and Arthur says, ‘he made me feel like everyone else.’
This was not only my first time writing a eulogy for a family I had never met, but also my first time visiting a relative of the deceased in person. I’d been so used to virtually receiving the low-hanging fruit of someone’s personality. I would pluck that fruit, adding flour, butter, cinnamon and spices to bake ‘it’ – the brief summation of a dead person’s many decades – into a comforting eulogy cake. But now I had my hands in the root-bed.
People say funerals should be a celebration of life, but it’s hard to gauge just how celebratory to be. Too cheerful and it looks like you’ve already let out the spare room. Then again, you don’t want to be too melodramatic – it’s already a funeral, for heaven’s sake – or, conversely, too detached and understated, for fear of whiffing the occasion. Arthur embodied these fears. He spoke eloquently, but didn’t want to risk ‘not doing Eddie justice’.
How was I to summarise everything Eddie was, and what he meant to his brother? Eddie’s personality and their familial bond was stronger and deeper than any arrangement of adjectives. The power I had felt scarily immediate and profound.
I would go on to write just one more eulogy – preceded once more by meeting the family in person – before I called time on my solemn side-hustle. And though my qualifications felt, shall we say, inappropriate at times in writing the last chapter and verse of strangers’ lives, what struck me most was that everyone has their moments, and on the fateful day of their funeral, it’s those moments that will ring out last and loudest. Those stories, acts of kindness, old jokes and quirky habits will always weave more neatly into a narrative the person in the ground will have known. Someone will be able to say ‘they mattered’ – even if that someone was a stranger, an amateur, and a student still two years from graduation.
