The Eulogy

I want to be clear that Gerald was not a close friend.

He was a friend in the way that a dentist is a friend. Someone you see twice a year, who knows things about you that you'd rather keep private, and who causes you pain that everyone agrees is for your own good. We played in the same recreational tennis league. He wore the same yellow wristband every match. He always brought a cooler of kombucha to share, (which no one wanted), but everyone drank because Gerald had a way of standing near the cooler that made refusal feel rude.

Gerald died in March, slipping on a wet dock while attempting to photograph a heron. The heron was fine...

His wife, Donna, called me on a Tuesday. I didn't know Donna well. I knew she existed, and that she found Gerald's kombucha phase less charming than he did. She told me she'd heard I was a "good writer," (I once won a caption contest for a local brewery) and she asked if I would look over the eulogy his brother-in-law, Phil, had written. Just a polish, she said. Fix the flow. Maybe tighten it up a bit.

I said yes immediately, because saying no to a widow felt like the sort of thing that got you audited...

Phil's eulogy was four pages long and can be summarized as follows: Gerald loved tennis. Gerald made kombucha. Once, Gerald helped Phil move a couch. The end.

It was not so much a tribute as a receipt.

I told myself I would only fix the grammar. I would not...! I was very clear about this with myself! ...I would not rewrite it. I would be a scalpel, not a wrecking ball. I would honor Phil's voice while subtly elevating it. I was a professional. I had won a caption contest.

I rewrote it completely in two hours.

I told Donna it was "lightly revised." She said it sounded wonderful and printed forty copies.

The service was held at a Presbyterian church that smelled of carpet cleaner and old hymnals. I arrived early and sat in the third row, which I immediately recognized as a mistake. Close enough to seem significant, far enough back to claim I wasn't. The forty copies of the eulogy sat in a stack by the door, printed on ivory cardstock that Donna had selected because Gerald, apparently, had strong feelings about paper weight.

Phil walked to the podium at 11:15.

He unfolded his papers.

He began to read.

The first sign that something was wrong was the silence that followed Phil's opening line... a silence that was not the respectful, contemplative kind, but the stunned, airless kind that precedes a car crash. Phil had opened with a joke. A joke I had written. A joke about Gerald's kombucha that I had thought was warm and affectionate and a little roast-y in a way that felt modern and humanizing.

The joke landed the way a filing cabinet lands when dropped from a window.

Phil soldiered on. He was a brave man, Phil. He had the face of someone who had agreed to carry a box and was now discovering the box contained bees. He read my words in his flat, bewildered voice, and with each sentence, I could feel the congregation turning... not physically, but spiritually- the way weather turns. I had given Gerald an inner life. I had described his "complicated relationship with stillness" and his "hunger for connection that tennis, improbably, had satisfied." I had referenced Camus. Gerald had never read Camus. Looking back, I am not entirely sure I had read Camus.

Phil reached the paragraph where I had written about Gerald standing on the dock, attempting to photograph the heron, and how that image... One man, one bird, the shutter's brief click, captured something essential about how Gerald moved through the world: always reaching, always almost there.

Phil's voice broke.

Not because it was moving. Because he had no idea who this person was.

During the reception, I found Donna by the coffee table. I told her I was sorry if the eulogy had been a bit... and here I paused as I searched for the word, 'much'.

Donna looked at me with the expression of someone who has just learned their house has a second mortgage they didn't know about.

"Phil texted me," she said. "He wants to know who Gerald's therapist was."

"Gerald didn't have a therapist," I said.

"I know," said Donna.

I told her I could explain. I told her I had maybe gotten a little carried away. I told her I was a visual thinker and sometimes things that seemed right on the page didn't- ... I stopped talking, because Donna had raised her hand in the specific way that means please stop talking.

She asked me to go speak to Phil.

I found Phil standing near the cheese cubes, holding a plate he wasn't eating from. I introduced myself. I explained my role. I told him I was the one who had revised his eulogy. I said "revised" again, with considerable optimism.

Phil said, "Which part did you write?"

I said, "Most of it."

Phil set down his plate.

He said, "Gerald hated tennis."

I said, "I... what?"

Phil said, "He only played because his doctor told him to walk more. He thought tennis was an absurd sport invented by people with too much time and not enough conflict in their lives." Phil picked a cube of cheese off his plate and put it back. "He told me that every week."

I stood with this information for a moment.

"The kombucha joke," I said. "Did he like the kombucha, at least?"

Phil looked at me. "He was lactose intolerant. The kombucha was so he'd have something at parties."

I had written seven hundred words about a man I had completely invented...

I went home and did what any reasonable person does after a social catastrophe: I decided to fix it.

There was a reception dinner that evening at Donna and Gerald's house, and I still had time. I would write something new. Something real. Something that captured the actual Gerald. The Gerald who hated tennis and drank kombucha out of dairy-related necessity and, as I now understood it, had moved through the world with a quiet, dry skepticism that everyone around him had apparently missed because he was very polite about it.

I texted Phil seventeen questions. Phil, to his enormous credit, answered all of them.

I wrote for three hours. I printed the new version at a FedEx two miles from Donna's house. I arrived at the dinner at 7:45.

I cornered Donna in the kitchen and explained that I had a revised version, actually revised, this time...! And that if she wanted, she could read it at dinner. As a... I searched for the word again in a brief pause. As a corrective.

Donna stared at me for a very long time.

"You want me," she said, "to read a second eulogy. At the dinner. For my husband."

"Only if you want to!" I said.

"A second eulogy," she said again. She seemed to be testing the weight of each word individually.

"It's shorter," I offered.

Donna took the papers from me. She looked at the first paragraph. She read it in silence. Then she folded it in half, and in half again, and put it in the pocket of her cardigan.

"Thank you," she said, in a tone that is used exclusively for things that are not thank-you's.

She went back to the living room. I stood in the kitchen next to a bowl of those little cocktail pickles for what I believe was four minutes. Then I ate three pickles and went home.

The actual Gerald, I later learned from Phil, had been funny. Quietly, precisely funny, in the way of people who observe things carefully and say them at exactly the right moment. He had a gift for noticing what other people missed. He once described the tennis league, our tennis league, as "twelve adults performing exercise as a social alibi," which is, I have to admit, the most accurate thing anyone has ever said about it.

He would have hated the eulogy I wrote for him. The first one, with the Camus.

He might have found the second one a little better.

He definitely would have found the whole situation funny... a man he barely knew, rewriting his life twice in one day, getting progressively more wrong in new and interesting directions. I think he would have said something dry and perfect about it, probably while standing near a cooler of kombucha that no one wanted but everyone drank.

I'm sorry, Gerald. I tried to do right by you.

I made it worse.