The eulogy at your partner's funeral you hope you can give

· 11 min read

The arithmetic nobody wants to do

One of you dies first. The probability that you go simultaneously is functionally zero. So one of you stands at a lectern and one of you is being talked about. The avoidance of this fact is not protective; it is sedating. Couples who never let the arithmetic into the room often end up with relationships built on the implicit lie that there is always more time. There is not always more time. There is, on average, a specific number of years left, and that number is doing nothing to wait for you. BJ Miller's hospice work is full of patients who said, near the end, I thought we had longer. They were wrong, and they knew, and it was too late.

The four sentences

Ira Byock's framework — Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you. — is not a script. It is a diagnostic. Sit with the actual person you are partnered with and ask yourself which of the four you have not adequately said. Which of the four would still feel new if you said it tonight? The one that feels most uncomfortable to imagine saying is usually the one that most needs to be said. The eulogy you want to give will be built on having said these. The eulogy you would have to give without having said them is the one that hurts the survivor most.

The wooden-spoon details

The eulogies that move people are never built out of biographical headlines. They are built out of specifics so small that nobody outside the relationship would have noticed them. The way she always hummed off-key while folding laundry. The way he insisted on the same broken mug. The way they said your name when calling from another room. The eulogy you want to give is full of these details, and you can only collect them by paying attention now. Joan Didion's portrait of John Gregory Dunne in The Year of Magical Thinking is built almost entirely out of these specifics — and it is what makes the loss readable as a real loss rather than an abstract one.

What you have not yet said

Make a list — actually make it, on paper — of the sentences you have been meaning to say to them and have not. I noticed this thing about you and it changed me. I have never thanked you for that. I have been carrying a small resentment about that and I want to let it go. The list is usually shorter than you fear. Each item is a deliverable. You do not have to deliver them all this week. You should deliver some of them this week. The horror of the imagined eulogy is mostly the horror of the unsaid. The unsaid is your inventory of regrettable cowardice. The cowardice is curable. Speak.

The selective edit

Every eulogy is selective. You will not mention the worst year. You will not mention the argument that nearly ended you. You will mention them obliquely, if at all. The selection is not dishonest — it is the natural pruning that the form requires. But notice which omissions you would feel relieved to make versus which omissions you would feel ashamed to make. The shame-of-omission tells you what still needs repair before the relationship's quiet conclusion makes repair retroactively impossible.

The eulogy as renovation order

If the eulogy you would want to give differs significantly from the eulogy you could honestly give today, the difference is your renovation order. It is concrete. I want to be able to say we became closer in the last decade. Then begin the work, today, of becoming closer in the next decade. I want to be able to say we forgave each other. Then begin the forgiveness, today. The renovation order is not a fantasy document. It is a maintenance schedule for a building that still has tenants in it.

The cold middle years

Many long relationships have a cold middle stretch — kids, work, exhaustion, the period during which both people are running so hard that the relationship becomes more logistics than intimacy. The cold middle is often the part of the eulogy that requires the most editing to render gracefully. The remedy is not to lie about it later but to thaw it earlier. Couples who let the cold middle stretch indefinitely often find, in the late years, that they cannot quite find their way back to each other — not because the love is gone but because the muscles have atrophied. The eulogy is harder to give over an atrophied muscle.

The voice you want to be able to use

Notice that the question is not just what you would want to say but how you would want to be able to say it. Steady? Or breaking? Both are honest, but the texture of the voice you want at the lectern tells you something. The widow who can speak steadily is not less in love than the one who cannot get through it. She has often just done the grief-in-installments work that allows the eulogy itself to feel like a completion rather than an avalanche. Bonanno's research on resilient bereavement supports this: the ability to speak about the deceased with stable emotion is associated with completed grief, not absent grief.

The eulogy as proof of attention

A good eulogy is, ultimately, proof that you were paying attention. That you noticed who they actually were, not who you needed them to be. That you saw them. The fear behind the eulogy thought experiment, for many people, is the suspicion that they have not been paying enough attention to be able to deliver this proof. The fear is correctable. Start paying attention. Joyce Carol Oates, in A Widow's Story, describes how she only began to register the specific texture of her husband after he was gone — and the regret of that delayed noticing is among the heaviest threads of the book.

The eulogy you would want to receive

Flip the exercise. What eulogy would you want them to be able to give about you? What would you want them to be able to say honestly? This reveals the partner-self you have been postponing becoming. The flipped exercise is harder because it requires you to be honest about your own conduct in the relationship. The eulogy you want to receive is, in effect, your performance review. Take it seriously. The deadline is real even if you do not know the date.

Writing it down

Some couples — usually after a health scare — actually write the eulogies and trade them, or write them and seal them. This sounds morbid; it is the opposite. Pennebaker's expressive writing research suggests that articulating the unimaginable in advance reduces, rather than increases, its grip on the imagination. Couples who have done this exercise report that it acted as a marriage tune-up of unusual depth. Not because they were rehearsing death, but because they were rehearsing the truth of what the relationship had meant, and discovered, in doing so, the parts that still needed building.

The mercy in advance

The most useful thing the imagined eulogy gives you is the mercy of advance. Most people only realize what they wanted to say after the chance to say it is gone. The eulogy thought experiment moves the realization forward by years. It says: here is what the future-grieving-you will wish present-you had handled. Handle it. The mercy is that it is not yet too late. The cruelty is only that we usually do not let ourselves access this knowledge until it is.

What Law Five asks here

Revise the relationship now, while both of you are alive, into the shape that the future eulogy will need it to be. Law Five is not an abstract principle here. It is a literal editing schedule with a real deadline. The deadline is unknown. The deadline is real. The work of revision — the four sentences, the small noticings, the long-postponed honesties, the renovation of the cold middle — is the work the surviving partner will be most grateful, later, that you both did. Do the work now. The eulogy is being written either way. You are choosing only how truthful it gets to be.

Citations

1. Byock, Ira. The Four Things That Matter Most: A Book About Living. New York: Free Press, 2004. 2. Byock, Ira. Dying Well: Peace and Possibilities at the End of Life. New York: Riverhead, 1997. 3. Miller, BJ, and Shoshana Berger. A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019. 4. Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Knopf, 2005. 5. Oates, Joyce Carol. A Widow's Story: A Memoir. New York: Ecco, 2011. 6. Bonanno, George A. The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. New York: Basic Books, 2009. 7. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, and David Kessler. On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. New York: Scribner, 2005. 8. Pennebaker, James W. Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2016. 9. Boss, Pauline. The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. 10. Lamott, Anne. Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair. New York: Riverhead, 2013. 11. Joseph, Stephen. What Doesn't Kill Us: The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth. New York: Basic Books, 2011. 12. Anderson, Susan. The Journey from Abandonment to Healing. Rev. ed. New York: Berkley, 2014.

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