The best things I’ve ever written have been eulogies. It’s a weird flex, I know, but when people are still talking about the first eulogy at the second (and they were delivered twelve years apart), you’ve kind of earned the right.
The first was for my Gram. Ann Cardinale was a spitfire Italian with porcelain skin, green eyes and dyed red hair (she was a firm believer that emerald-eyed people looked best with fiery hair). She stood 4’ 11,” if you were being generous with your assessment. She spent Sundays in the TV room yelling at the Browns like they could hear her from the sidelines.
One time, long after she’d received her AARP card, a man tried to steal her purse outside the Richmond Mall near Mayfield, OH. She cursed and spat at him, fighting tooth and nail. She refused to let go. The robber eventually got away with her bag, but he had to have realized that picked the wrong little old lady to fuck with. She was all fire. It skipped a generation, but I inherited mine from her.
The second eulogy was for my Papa. He wore rectangular-ish bifocals and had a mustache pretty much his whole adult life. He shaved it one time in fairly recent history, and our 10-person clan collectively decided it was a failed experiment. Joseph Cardinale was decidedly not a spitfire. In fact, the man rarely got worked up about anything. He loved pushing buttons, though. He pushed Gram’s the most.
They met at a bowling alley, and that’s all anyone can tell you about how they fell in love. When asked directly, my grandfather would always make up a weird tale about how he told Gram he would only buy her a cheeseburger if she married him. His response differed depending on who asked. This is one of my favorite things about my grandfather: The real love story was reserved just for him. He took the secret to his grave.
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Before I moved to the West Coast, I never realized that eulogies aren’t really A THING everywhere. Portlanders have celebrations of life. People wear colors and prints, they “pour one out” for the deceased. Funny anecdotes and stories counter the melancholy. Everyone has a chance to speak.
Midwesterners have funerals. We wear black and cry. It’s a multi-day affair. There’s coffee and cookies in the funeral home basement during the wake. Even non-believers bust out a few “Our Fathers.” Providing nothing truly horrifying happened, the caskets are generally left open.
We attend mass with a priest; there are Bible readings and hymns and few people can hold it together long enough to speak articulately about the person who has passed. We designate pallbearers and eat pasta served family-style at the luncheon following the final farewell at the cemetery.
We mourn collectively, and then we move on. Ashes to ashes; dust to dust.
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I remember getting the call from my dad that Grandma Ann had passed. I was standing in my boyfriend’s apartment just off the Syracuse University campus. My mother was too distraught to deliver the message herself. I emailed my professors and took the next available flight to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. I remember asking right away, “Who’s giving the eulogy?”
I’d watched my cousin Deena give the two eulogies for the Petrovic side’s patriarch and matriarch. I was in the fourth grade when they passed within six months of one another. I remember that the eulogy felt like the most significant part. It was a decisive send-off; happy memories shared as a means of saying good-bye one last time.
I also remember how hard it was for my cousin to write my grandmother’s speech. Deena pulled it off, but it required some tact. To use Violet’s own words, she was “a bit of a pill.”
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It turns out that not a lot of people actually want to deliver a eulogy. This makes me uniquely positioned to do so. The only writer in the family, prose is my love language. I excel at email pep talks and handwritten appreciation letters, naughty text messages and affectionate ramblings sent through WhatsApp. Long-forgotten diatribes typed in the notes section of my phone.
Tributes finalized at three in the morning and shared from the pulpit.
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Successful eulogies are comprised of a few key components.
1. Touching anecdotes
2. Keeping it together
3. Loving/respecting/caring about the deceased
You don’t have to be special or a good writer or a decent public speaker or even the person who knows the most about the person who passed. Those characteristics are all great; they’re less significant than people think.
The hardest hurdle to overcome is the second. Tapping the Nelson Mandela of eulogy deliverance to wax poetic about Aunt Suzy and how much we’ll all miss her famous strawberry pies is going to be an unequivocal disaster if he’s sobbing to the point of incoherence.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a crier to my very core. I tear up at the Amazon commercial where the priest and the imam buy each other knee cushions. I once sobbed during 500 Days of Summer (not a sad movie), and let’s be honest, I’ve cried at nearly 100 percent of the in-flight movies I’ve self-selected. So help me GOD if someone’s dog dies.
It may surprise you, then, to know that I am comparatively chill AF about familial deaths. And to be clear, we are talking about the deaths of grandparents, most of whom lived into their 80s and 90s. My Gram struggled against the toll that a near lifetime of Type 1 diabetes takes on your physical form.
By the time my grandfather passed, the fun-loving Papa I knew growing up was long gone, replaced by an unrecognizable man who was miserable and a little mean, one clinging to life only because he was too afraid to die. Their deaths were marked more by mercy than outright tragedy.
I’ve also been lucky enough to be exposed to a worldview in which death is neither unfortunate, nor the end. I was taking a Philosophy of Death class when my grandmother died. Friends often commented that it seemed like a morbid way to spend a semester, but I found it fascinating and, when the time came, very comforting.
By the time my grandfather passed, I’d become immersed in the yogic philosophy that assures us of the existence of past and future lives. While I was happy to participate in the expected funeral ritual of saying meaningless things like, “at least he and Gram are together now” or “he’s playing jokes on us from heaven,” my greatest hope for my grandfather was that he would overcome his fear of dying the next time around. But why argue with something that gives someone peace? We all have our ways of coping. The promise of another go is mine.
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My grandmother’s eulogy is lost to the void of an era that existed before every single thought we’ve ever had was automatically saved to the cloud. It is a memory only to those who remember the way it made them feel.
My grandfather’s eulogy is memorialized here. He was so important to my childhood. This is my best attempt to help those who knew him (and, now, those who never will) understand the kind of person he was.
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Good morning, everyone.
Let’s begin with a couple riddles: Which way does the smoke point on an electric train? If a rooster lays an egg on the roof and the wind is blowing from the east, which way will the egg fall?
I remember standing in my grandparents’ apple-themed kitchen spinning in circles, pointing in every direction. Papa kept shaking his head, smirking. There isn’t any smoke from an electric train. Roosters don’t lay eggs.
Everybody has a favorite family member. Papa was mine. I remember when I was 16 and just learning to drive. We were on our way to a cookout at my Aunt Karen’s house. Spatial awareness having never been my strong suit, I tried to park a little too close to the curb and grazed the neighbor’s mailbox. My mom got out of the car to yell at me; Papa was already halfway up the driveway, storming toward the neighbor’s house to yell at them because their mailbox was sticking out too far.
I knew in that moment: That’s the kind of man you want in your corner.
I think a lot of people considered my grandfather to be their favorite relative. He was just one of those fun-loving people that made every walk into an adventure, every party a little more exciting.
Growing up, Papa was the best because he himself was the biggest kid of all. He was the kind of person who would take you for strolls to see the neighbor’s dog, Pepper, whom you loved desperately because you weren’t allowed to have your own. He’d take you down to his workshop to play with tracing paper and mess around with his tools. In the basement, you would listen to records and cassettes and spend hours on your backs throwing kush balls against the ceiling, trying to hit the one loose panel just right so that the ball would stick.
He was always prepared for a game of Uno or B.S., a game based on deception that Papa naturally excelled at. I can hear Gram in my head now, “You gotta watch him, Karli. He cheats.” He drove her insane, always with a twinkle in his eye and a little smile on his face. That was his girl. He loved her more than anything.
Papa was the kind of person who would spend all afternoon helping you collect acorns, so the squirrels would have something to eat when the weather turned—only to have John the killjoy tell you that we absolutely would not be taking a bucket of acorns home with us. The squirrels at the Petrovic residence were going to have to starve that winter. “That’s OK,” Papa told me. “We’ll keep them in the garage until the next time you come over.”
And he probably would have kept them until the day he died. The man never threw anything away. He collected golf balls and tees and had boxes upon boxes of perfectly sharpened pencils. The garage was filled with nuts and bolts and nails; there was never a shortage of Society Bank balloons.
Papa was the person you called when something needed to be fixed. He loved to take things apart. He was fascinated by the inner workings of electronics and new technologies. He was Mr. Fix-It, and he taught us all to be curious, to question everything.
He was always giving sound advice about staying safe, too: Never leave your cup unattended at a party, always have your keys out when you’re walking to your car, make sure to keep your windows locked at night. To this day, I can’t drink out of a water fountain without letting it run first to “let the pipes clear.”
But eulogies are supposed to be about how the deceased was a God-fearing man who went to church on Sundays. Papa was that, too. He was a true believer. He shared his faith with us not by reading scriptures or singing hymns, but by showing us that there are good people in this world, that hard work matters, that there is magic everywhere, if you pay attention to it.
This last story is my favorite. Papa and I spent a lot of time taking walks together. Whenever we saw a white cotton-like fluff floating in the air, we would try to snatch it from the wind. Papa told me these were money-stealers and that whenever you caught one, wealth was sure to follow. Inevitably, we always found a quarter along our path.
It took me so many years to realize that he would toss a coin from his pocket while I was busy chasing the money-stealer, trying to grab it midair. Even now, I couldn’t tell you what these mysterious white wisps are. I know them only as money-stealers, and I try to catch them whenever I can.
With pleasure,
Yes, Misstrix
P.S. Thank you to everyone who wrote me after the post about E.’s accident. It was good to know I’m not the only one who has dropped a child. Since the incident, the Bean has figured out how to stand in her stroller and crib, so it’s only a matter of time before she tries to throw herself out of those contraptions as well. Fun times!