Eulogy Examples

My father, Walter Anthony Prezioso, went by Wally to everyone except my mother, who called him Walter when she meant business, which was often.

Dad was born in 1949 in Erie, Pennsylvania, and he stayed within nine miles of that hospital for seventy-six years. He was not a man who needed to see the world. He said everything he wanted was inside a twenty-minute drive, and as far as I can tell, he was right.

He worked at the plant on Twelfth Street for thirty-one years. He never once described that job as his passion. He described it as his job. It bought this house, four sets of braces and two college educations, and he was proud of it the way men of his generation were proud: quietly, and mostly by not complaining.

What Dad actually loved was fixing things. If you brought him a broken lamp he looked happier than if you brought him a gift. Half the appliances in this room have been repaired by my father, several of them without the owner’s permission.

He taught me to drive in the grocery store parking lot on Sunday mornings. He taught me to shake hands and look people in the eye. And he taught me, mostly by doing it, that you go to the funeral. You go to the wedding. You go to the hospital. You show up when it is inconvenient, especially when it is inconvenient, and you do not announce that you are doing it.

He was not perfect and he would not want a speech that said he was. He was stubborn. He held opinions well past their expiration date. He and I did not speak for most of 2009 over something so small that neither of us could remember it by 2010.

But I called him every Sunday for the last fourteen years, and he answered every single time, and he always opened with the same thing: “Well, hello there.” I would give a great deal to hear it once more.

Dad, the lamp still works. The car still starts. You showed up for all of us for seventy-six years, and today all of us showed up for you.

I had my grandmother for thirty-one years, which I am told is a lot, and which does not feel like enough.

Nana, or Josephine Marie Tancredi to the Social Security Administration, was born in 1931 above her parents' bakery in Providence, Rhode Island. She was making bread before she started school. She was still making bread three weeks ago.

There are eleven grandchildren in this room, and I promise you every one of us believed we were her favorite. I have thought about how she managed that, and I have decided it was because she never divided her attention. When you were with Nana, you were the only thing happening. She would put down whatever she was holding, sit at the kitchen table, ask you a question, and then, and this is the rare part, listen to the answer.

She fed people. That was her love and her argument and her apology. If you were sad, she fed you. If you were late, she fed you and mentioned it. There is a sauce in this family that has no written recipe. Four of us have tried to write it down. None of the four versions taste right, and I have made my peace with the fact that they never will.

She was not soft. She buried a husband at fifty-three and raised the last two children alone, and she did not talk about how hard that was until she was in her eighties, and even then only once.

The last thing she said to me was about my coat. She said it was not warm enough. She was right.

If you want to honor my grandmother this week, here is how. Call the person in your family you have been meaning to call. Sit at the table with them. Put your phone in another room. Ask them a question, and then listen to the answer.

My grandfather, Earl Dean Hobart, was ninety-four, and he would want that said up front, because he was proud of it and because he thought it excused a great deal.

Grandpa was born on a farm outside Ottumwa, Iowa, in 1932. He was drafted, served two years, came home, married my grandmother eleven days later, and carried rural mail for thirty-eight years. He drove the same route so many times he could tell you which mailboxes were crooked and how long they had been that way.

He was the least hurried man I have ever met. Ask him a question and he took four full seconds before answering. As a kid I found that maddening. As an adult I have come to think it was the most respectful thing about him: he actually considered what you said before he replied.

He taught all seven grandchildren to fish, badly, on a lake with almost no fish in it. That was not the point and all of us knew it.

He kept a notebook in his truck with the name of every dog on his mail route. When he retired, the last page had two hundred and sixteen names on it.

Grandma died in 2019. He said very little about it. He simply started coming to Sunday dinner an hour early and staying an hour late, and none of us ever mentioned why.

The last time I sat with him he asked about my work, then my wife, then my kids, in that order, and then he asked if I was happy. I said I thought so. He took his four seconds. Then he said, “That’s the right answer.”

Grandpa, that was the right answer. Thank you for waiting for it.

I have been Dominic Vance’s wife for thirty-nine years and I do not know how to introduce myself any other way, so you will have to bear with me.

Dom was born in Bakersfield in 1961. I met him in 1985 at a wedding neither of us wanted to attend. He asked me to dance and stepped on my foot twice, and then he apologized for it for the next thirty-nine years, usually on our anniversary, usually while stepping on my foot.

He taught high school history for twenty-nine years. There are former students in this room. I know, because they wrote to me this week, and they all said a version of the same thing: he made me feel like I was smart. That was his gift. He could find the one thing you were good at and hold it up to the light until you could see it too.

At home he was messier than he let his students believe. He left cabinet doors open. He sang in the car with total confidence and no accuracy. He made the same three dinners on rotation for four decades and presented each one as a surprise.

We had two children and one very bad year, in 2003, that we came out the other side of. I am not going to say more about it than that, except this. He did the work. He went to counseling he did not want to go to. He changed things about himself that were hard to change. A lot of people are kind. Fewer people are willing to be corrected.

I was told a eulogy should end on something uplifting. Here is the best I have. I got thirty-nine years with a man who was still trying to be better at sixty-four. Not everyone gets one of those. I got one of those.

Goodnight, Dom. Leave the cabinet doors open. I will get them.

My wife’s name was Priya Ramaswamy Bell, and she would want me to tell you that she kept her name, and that it took me nine months in 1998 to stop apologizing to my mother about it.

Priya was born in Hyderabad and came to Ohio at eleven with two suitcases and a winter coat that was not equal to the assignment. She used to say America introduced itself to her as a wind.

She was an emergency room nurse for twenty-six years, most of it on nights. I do not know how she did it. She would come home at seven in the morning, sleep until two, and be entirely present for our daughters from two until nine. She never once let them feel like they were competing with her exhaustion.

She was blunt. If you asked Priya how you looked, you found out how you looked. She had a laugh you could hear through a closed door. She could not sit through a movie without narrating it. She was ferociously good at her job and she never brought it home, except twice, and both times she cried in the garage first so the girls would not see.

She was diagnosed in October and she died in June, and in between she organized everything. There is a binder. Of course there is a binder. She wrote a letter to each of our daughters, told me exactly when to give it to them, and made me promise not to read them. I have not, and I will not, and it is taking everything I have.

Twenty-eight years. Two daughters. One binder. I was very lucky, and I knew it at the time, which is the only thing I have to be proud of today.

There were three of us: Marcus, me, and our sister Tanya. Marcus was the oldest, a fact he mentioned constantly, right up until about six weeks ago.

My brother was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1968. He was the loud one. He was the one who got in trouble, talked his way out of it, and then, somehow, got the rest of us in trouble instead.

He drove a truck for twenty-two years, long haul, mostly the western routes. He called Mama every night from wherever he was. Every night. Idaho, Nevada, a truck stop in Wyoming in a snowstorm. He would call and say, “Mama, it’s your favorite,” and she would say, “You’re the only one calling,” which was true and which he took as agreement.

Marcus was not an easy person for the first half of his life. Some of you know that. He would want me to say it plainly rather than leave it sitting in the room. He got sober in 2011. He stayed sober for fourteen years, and he took at least six other men with him, and two of them are sitting in the third row.

He showed up for my kids when I could not. He fixed our mother’s roof twice. He never let me pay him for anything, and he never let me forget it either.

Big brother, I am going to be the oldest now, and I want you to know that I hate it. I will call Mama tonight. I will tell her it is her favorite. She will correct me.

My sister Bernadette was fifty-eight, and if she were here she would tell you she was fifty-four, and she would be extremely convincing about it.

Bernie was the second of four, born in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1967. She was the one who organized things. Every holiday, every reunion, every emergency. When our father got sick she had a spreadsheet within six hours. I remember being annoyed by that at the time, and I remember being grateful for it within a week.

She taught second grade for thirty-one years at the same school. She could not go to the grocery store without meeting a former student. She remembered all of them. Some of them are here this morning.

Bernie never married, and she got tired of being asked about it somewhere around thirty-five. She had a full life and a loud house and a standing Tuesday dinner with the same four friends since 1994. Three of those four friends are in the second row. The fourth is on speakerphone from Arizona.

She was funny and she was bossy. Those two things came from the same place, and you did not get one without the other.

The last thing my sister did, four days before she died, was call each of us and go through her list. Insurance. The cat. Which cousin gets which chair. She was still organizing. She would want me to tell you that the reception is in the parish hall and that there is plenty of parking behind the building.

Dana Whitfield and I met in 1994 in the worst apartment either of us has ever lived in. There was a hole in the bathroom floor. You could see the neighbors' ceiling fan through it. We paid four hundred dollars a month and we thought we were getting away with something.

We were friends for thirty-one years after that. Her family has been generous enough to let a friend speak, and I want to be careful with it, because the people who knew her longest are sitting right in front of me.

Here is Dana as I knew her.

She was the person who told you the truth. Not cruelly, because she was not cruel, but she would not participate in a story you were telling yourself. Three times in my life Dana said something to me I did not want to hear. All three times she was right, and two of those times it changed the direction of my life.

She kept every birthday. Thirty-one years, never missed one, including the two years we were barely speaking.

She was an accountant, which surprised people who met her at a party, and she was very good at it, and she has done the taxes of about nine people in this room for free.

Dana got sick fast. She did not want a fuss and she is going to be annoyed about all of this. To her family I would like to say: she talked about you constantly. Everything she was proud of was one of you.

I am going to keep calling on her birthday. I do not know yet who I will be calling. But I am going to keep doing it.

I am Theo Amaya’s mother. I did not expect to be standing here, and I am not going to pretend that any part of this is right.

Theo was thirty-six. He was born in Santa Fe on a Tuesday in March, three weeks early and in a hurry, which turned out to be the entire personality.

He fought wildland fires for eleven seasons and then worked six years as a paramedic in Albuquerque. He was very good at frightening jobs and very bad at describing them to his mother. The answer was always, “It was fine, Ma.”

He was the friend people called at two in the morning. I know this because at least twenty of you have told me so this week, and because I once watched him leave a Thanksgiving table to go help a friend move a couch.

He made an enormous amount of noise. He cooked badly and constantly. He was thirty-six years old and still could not be trusted with a secret or a hot pan.

He and Sara had eighteen months of marriage. Sara, I want to say in front of everybody that he was happier in those eighteen months than I ever saw him, that you gave him that, and that you are my family now whether it suits you or not.

There is no lesson here. I have looked for one. My son was kind and loud and he loved his people out loud, and the only thing I know to do with that is to ask you to be loud about the people you love, starting today, in this room, on the way to your cars.

I am Alan, Frank’s nephew. Frank asked me to do this a long time ago, at a barbecue, half joking. I said yes. Here we are.

Francis Xavier Dolan was eighty-one. He was a plumber for forty-four years, a parishioner at this church for sixty, and a Mets fan for reasons no one in this family ever understood.

Three things about my uncle.

He was generous with money and stingy with praise, and when he did give you a compliment you could live off it for a year.

He never left a house without asking whether anything needed fixing, and he meant it, and he came back on Saturday with the part.

And he took care of my aunt Rosemary for the last six years of her life, every day, without help and without complaint, and he never once described it as a burden.

That is what I have. Frank would not have wanted a long speech. He would have wanted us to eat something and get home at a reasonable hour, and the family has arranged both.