Eulogy examples for a mother, father, grandparent and friend

Good morning. I'm Anna, Joan's oldest. Thank you all for coming, and thank you to everyone who brought food to the house this week. Mom would want you to know she is keeping a list of who brought what, so she can return the dishes.

She really would have. My mother ran her life on lists: groceries, birthdays, library books due back, all written on the backs of envelopes in her square office handwriting. On Tuesday we found one in the kitchen drawer from 1994. It said: “Call Marie. Defrost turkey. Be nicer to Dan.” Dan is my father. They were married for forty-seven years, so I think the list worked.

Mom grew up in Dayton, the fourth of six kids, and left home at eighteen with one suitcase and a job at the phone company. She met Dad at a bowling alley, and neither of them ever bowled again. For thirty-one years she was the secretary at Lincoln Elementary, which means a lot of you were sent to her office at some point, with a nosebleed or a forgotten lunch or a note from your teacher. She kept a drawer of granola bars and spare mittens for exactly those people.

What I want you to know about her is that she noticed things. The year I was twelve, she started packing me two sandwiches and told me to give one to whoever looked like they needed it. I thought it was another one of her rules. It wasn't. The girl who sat next to me at lunch had been coming to the office hungry, and Mom had noticed what wasn't in her lunch bag. She never told anyone, including me. That girl was Becca, who is here today, and who told me the whole story on the phone last week.

That was her way. She didn't make speeches about kindness. She made lists, and then she did what was on them, and most of what was on them was other people.

The last list I found was on her nightstand. It said: “Pay water bill. Call Anna re: Thanksgiving. Bulbs.” She planted tulip bulbs in the front bed in October, when she already knew she might not see them come up.

So here is my list, Mom. Return the dishes. Call Becca. Be nicer to Dad. And in April, go look at the front bed.

Thank you, everybody.

My mother, Rosa, did not like a fuss, so I'm going to keep this short. She'd check.

She raised three boys in a two-bedroom apartment above a laundromat on Fifth Street, and until I was ten I thought every home smelled like warm towels. She worked nights as a hospital clerk and still made every one of our games: same seat, same thermos.

People say a mother's love is unconditional. Mom's had conditions. You called if you'd be late. You looked people in the eye when they talked to you. You never left a dish in the sink for someone else to wash. I'm forty-six, and I still can't leave a dish in the sink.

Mom, we kept it short, like you asked. We'll keep the rest too: the calling, the eye contact, the dishes. Thank you for every one of your conditions. Rest now.

For those who don't know me, I'm Kate. Frank was my dad.

If you ever visited my father, at some point he would disappear, and you'd find him in your driveway checking your tire pressure. He did it to everyone: me, my husband, the pastor, the kid who delivered the paper. He carried a tire gauge in his shirt pocket for forty years. It's in my pocket today.

Dad was a quiet man in a loud family. He grew up on a dairy farm outside Eau Claire, spent two years in the Army in Germany, and came home to run the parts counter at Hansen Ford for thirty-eight years. If your car broke down anywhere in this county in those years, there's a good chance Dad knew what was wrong before the mechanic did.

He wasn't a man for speeches, and he'd be uncomfortable that I'm giving one. In forty-four years I heard him say “I love you” maybe a dozen times, mostly on the phone, mostly as he was hanging up. I never once doubted it. He drove four hours each way to fix the furnace in my first apartment, in January, and slept on my floor. He learned to text at seventy-five so he could send my son baseball scores. Every text was the score and nothing else. My son saved all of them.

When I was sixteen, he taught me to drive in the church parking lot, and the only advice he gave me was: “Leave more room than you think you need.” I thought he was talking about the car. I've since decided he meant most things. Leave room for people to be wrong. Leave room to change your mind. Leave room to get there late and in one piece.

Dad, you left us plenty of room. We'll take it from here.

And I'll check the tires.

My father, Gary, was not an easy man, and most of you know that. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. He hated pretending more than almost anything.

He drank for a long time, and those years were hard on my mother, my brother and me. Then, when I was nineteen, he stopped, and he stayed stopped for twenty-six years. I didn't understand until much later what that cost him every day, or that he did it with no promise that any of us would come back. Some of us took a while.

So I want to talk about the second half. The man who drove my kids to swim practice at five in the morning. The man who rebuilt my back porch without being asked, which was how he apologized: by doing something right. The man some of you knew from Tuesday nights, who picked up the phone at any hour for anyone who needed him.

I can't tell you he was a perfect father. I can tell you he became a better one, which is harder.

Dad, thank you for the second half. We'll remember all of it.

Grandma June taught every one of her grandchildren three things: how to play gin rummy, how to lose at gin rummy, and how to make pie crust with cold hands. I'm still bad at two of them.

I'm Sam, the third of her eleven grandchildren, and I spent every summer from six to fourteen at her house on Pike Lake. Her kitchen had a yellow phone on the wall with a cord so long she could talk to my mother while walking out to the garden. She'd tell Mom we were eating vegetables while handing us popsicles.

She lived through things I've only read about. She grew up on a farm during the Depression, waited out two brothers' service in Korea, and lost my grandfather after fifty-two years of marriage. She didn't talk about the hard parts much. When I asked her once how she got through the year after Grandpa died, she thought about it for a long time and said, “I kept the bird feeders full.” I didn't understand that then. I think I do now. You keep doing the small, ordinary thing, and eventually it carries you.

Being her grandchild meant she had time for you, specifically you. She remembered which of us hated raisins. On each of our eighteenth birthdays she wrote us a letter by hand, three pages, and no two were alike. I've read mine more times than I can count. It ends: “Be brave about the small things too.”

Grandma, I'm trying. And I'll keep the feeders full.

My grandfather, Lou, had opinions. About the Cubs, about the right way to load a dishwasher, and about whether a tie was necessary for anything short of a wedding. It was not. He would want me to point out that I'm not wearing one.

He was a mail carrier for thirty-four years. He knew every dog on his route by name, and most of the people. When he retired, the families on Maple and Fourth threw him a party in somebody's garage, and forty people came. Forty people, for the mailman. That tells you most of what you need to know.

He also told the same six jokes my entire life. I've heard the one about the duck and the pharmacist maybe four hundred times. I'm not going to tell it today, because nobody can do it the way he did: the long pause before the punch line, where he'd start laughing and couldn't finish.

Grandpa, I'll tell the duck joke to my kids, badly, so they know it existed. Thank you for all four hundred times.

Mara and I met in the laundry room of our freshman dorm, when she took my wet clothes out of the dryer and left them on the folding table. Folded. Nobody had ever been so rude and so considerate at the same time. We were friends for twenty-six years after that.

Most of you knew Mara from one part of her life: the clinic, the choir, the running club, the street she lived on. One of the strange gifts of this week has been finding out how many parts there were. She was a pediatric nurse for twenty years. She sang alto in the choir, loudly. She ran nine marathons and complained through every one of them.

For me, she was the person who called. On my birthday, every year, at six in the morning, because she wanted to be first. When my marriage ended, she called every night for a month, and some nights we barely talked. She just stayed on the line while I did the dishes. When my son was born, she was in the hospital parking lot before my own mother was.

Friendship doesn't come with ceremonies the way family does. Nobody gives you a certificate at twenty-five years. So I want to say it out loud, here, in front of everyone: Mara was my family. She chose me in a laundry room and kept choosing me.

Mara, I'm going to miss the six a.m. calls. My birthday is in March. I'm going to set an alarm and call someone first.

I'm Dave. I lived next door to Harold for nineteen years.

The first week we moved in, our dog got out, and Harold walked the neighborhood with me until midnight with a flashlight and a pack of hot dogs. We found her asleep in his garage. He laughed about that for nineteen years.

Every winter he shoveled our walk before we were up, and he never once mentioned it. He waved at every car on our street, including the ones he didn't know. Especially those.

Our street will be quieter without him, and harder to walk in January. Harold, thank you for being a good neighbor. It's rarer than it should be.