I am here today because my wife has always wanted me to do her eulogy.
It started off as a joke you know. In the very early years of our relationship, she told me that she wasn’t interested in losing me first. It wouldn’t be the first time she would say something like that. The request came in many variations, but always jokingly, and in response, I would laugh and move on. Or I would come up with a comeback joke. It became a morbid private joke between us. But over time, the joke grew a bit more serious, a bit sadder. And one day when we were finally old and grey, and comfortable in each other:
She said, “You know…you should do it.”
I asked, “Do what?” She replied, “My eulogy.”
And for the first time, it wasn’t’ a joke. It wasn’t a joke because we were closer to the end. The grey hairs, the body aches, and fleeting memory reminded us that our time was limited as humans. It reminded us that as much as we complained about life, we adored it. As we aged together we would often wonder about the length of life, seemingly so long until the sunset hours. It seemed unfair.
So when she said it this time, it wasn’t a joke, it was a request, and gave the word heartbreak a whole new meaning for me.
I didn’t reply for a while, struck at the reality of it all. In the silence, she finally explained herself.
She said, rough and wrinkled hand in mine:
“I wouldn’t be able to handle it. You often say I’m stronger than you, but not when it comes to this. I love you infinitely. The years we’ve built together are my life. Sometimes I wonder if other relationships are like this. As stupid as it sounds, I don’t know if there is someone out there who loves their partner as much as I love you. I think, what I feel for you transcended love a long time ago, and I have told you this before. It’s why I pepper ‘I love you’ it in every other sentence. I say it so casually now because it doesn’t really hold my feelings. My feelings have long spilled over the word, uncontainable. What we have now is more and more and more. Between us, there are millions of connections, tiny little milliseconds of moments that will stretch and stretch and never end. Even when we end. I want you to know that you’ve given me peace and I tried really hard not to take it for granted. Sometimes I failed, but overall I think I tried. So, please. Please do my eulogy. Don’t leave before me. Let me have this one. Give me permission to go first. Consider it as the prize I get for sticking through your jokes, your not-so-improved cooking, and your stubbornness. You understand? “
And I did understand what she was asking. It felt absolutely ridiculous, in how unfair it was. Absolutely selfish. And it felt a little downgrading. Like she was making her life seem meaningless without me. Like our children, our family didn’t matter. But I understood. I had always expected to see this request in this form, serious and pleading. From the first time she had jokingly asked 50 years back, I had kept it. In the decades that followed I had practised seriously answering it from time to time. The answer always changed, sometimes motivated by anger, sometimes sadness, sometimes after a fight, and other times after remembering how much I loved her.
So I understood and knew what my answer would be.
As incredulous as it may seem to some of you, I’ve known for a long time that my wife would leave first, and that’s why I loved her fiercely. I held her with the intensity of someone who knew they could lose it all. It crept up on me sometimes, the realization that one day she would go, and I would have to keep on going. That she would take my heart, still beating and I would have to keep living for the other pieces of my life that mattered. I knew that at some point I would need the memories to keep me standing, the scent of her, and the fact that I mattered to her. That I mattered to her to the point that she would ask me something so cruel. That she would put herself above me in such a way.
But still, I understood.
So I answered her, “Fine, yes, I will do it. No one knows you more than me anyway. I’ve suffered through it all. The good, the bad, the-you with diarrhoea. The-you on your period. Drunk. High. I mean, I’ve known you for decades. Who else is going to do your eulogy? So yeah I’ll do it. But you have to promise me something.”
“What?” she asked trying hard not to cry.
And I said, crying for the first time in a decade. Crying a little like I am crying now.
No actually. I begged her and said, “I want you to fight. To keep pushing. To live as long as you can. Compete with the stars and vow to outlive them. Challenge time and death and go on. Fight and fight until the universe calls you to come back home. Then, and only then will you leave us. That’s the only way I will ever do your eulogy.”
We held each other. And let me just reassure all of you. It is possible to have amazing sex at 70 years old. So yes your ma, grandma, and great-grandma to some of you fucked the daylights out of me that night. I saw stars hunny…hahaha. Don’t look so scandalized. Now it will be even harder to forget her, won’t it? Our beautiful Nora.
So anyway, that’s why I am doing this eulogy. A lot of you couldn’t understand why I wanted to do it. Some even fought me, thinking I wanted to hog this beautiful woman. My wife. But this is why I fought so hard to do her eulogy. It is also why I’ve been looking so unfazed by her death. I have been steeling myself you see, steeling myself for this moment, to do this fucking eulogy. This stupid thing I promised to do. Something I suspected would nearly destroy me, but because I love this girl so much, I promised I would do. So I had to be strong, stronger than I have ever been in my life so that I could get through saying all of this without choking out, without throwing myself on the floor and howling like my grandparents used to do. The noise that is fighting to climb out my throat is horrifying, and I am afraid that if I let it out, I will get internal bleeding.
But I get it now, why she insisted that I do her eulogy. Because I don’t feel like dying alongside her. In preparing for the words of this eulogy, I’ve had time to look back, and I’ve had time to accept and be strong. I’ve always known that she was smart, and she always knew what would be best for us. So I trust that she knew what she was doing in leaving first, and I am willing to wait. To wait until my time comes, then join her.
So that’s her. My wife. She was smart. Too smart. And she was kind. She loved cooking for people. She loved dressing up. And she was loved. She was loved by so many. Each of you has memories of her, and with her that are unique to you. Moments that only you share with her. She was a different person for all of us, and she meant different things to all of us. She was a mother, a sister, a grandmother, and great grandmother, a best friend, a friend, and my world. I am glad she was able to share a piece of herself with all of us. That she let us in, and we stayed with her until the end.
It will be difficult without her, but maybe with each other, it will be okay.
I don’t have much else to say and I really want to have a good cry.
But before I go, I want to tell you something that I learned because of a silly joke my wife made 50 years ago. Love each other like you might lose each other first. Okay?
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