Eulogy is literally the saying of “good words” about a deceased person. I delivered one for my mom when she passed away. It was a profound threshold experience for me to craft it and deliver it. I then officiated at the site of her internment, and later at a mass in her honor.
In writing the eulogy, I considered the story of her life, her challenges, how she overcame them, her strength and resolve, her love of family and what each person meant to her. It was an homage to character and legacy. It was a portrait of courage and commitment and of a life in love with life.
It’s interesting what doesn’t go into a eulogy: the smaller moments that seemed so important once. No mention is usually made of the fumbles and foibles, unless in jest and illustrating the person’s idiosyncratic nature of which our fondest wish is to have it back in our lives. The focus is on the arc of a life. What makes the person so special to us, and why the world was better for having him or her in it.
Today, my client lost a brother very suddenly. It is still not known what took his life. Again, our conversation went to the things that endure. In our mourning, all those daily things that nibble away at our heels in ordinary time become insignificant. The “Lion of the Senate,” Ted Kennedy, passed on having had the great blessing of time to complete his memoirs: a gift to all who knew him and loved him, and one to anyone who may read it.
All this has me thinking about the place of eulogy in our lives. We wait until a person is no longer around to write such things. Some practice the living eulogy at which the person about whom they are writing is in attendance at the reading.
More significant and powerful is writing your own. Autobiography is an exercise in self-analysis. It looks at our adventure from the standpoint of a future time. It provides the necessary moments, often not taken, to look at one’s life in the sweep of our history. What is the story-line? What are the side-trips off the planned path that shaped us the most? Whose are the shoulders on which we humbly stand?
While unrelated to eulogy in its origins, elegy (ἐλεγεία) captures the meaning of a person’s passage and the large hole it leaves in our lives. It gives voice to lamentation and it, too, has a place in the work of the living, though, regrettably, it is most often nowadays talked about as a quaint antiquity.
The elegy has a rhyming structure: a couplet with a line in dactylic hexameter followed by a line in dactylic pentameter. The poem of Thomas Gray in 1751, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” is a prime example of the few elegiac poems written in English. To quote one well-known stanza:
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Today, as I prepare to attend a wake for my wife’s great-aunt, who passed on earlier in the week, and the funeral service tomorrow, my thoughts turn to the place and importance of eulogy and elegy in our spiritual lives. It also suggests the value of the practice of writing one’s own elegy to life’s mysteries as part of a broader autobiography, as a gift to ourselves, and those who see less of us than they would like owing to our frenzied activity and travel.
None of us know the time when we will breath our last. There’s no time to waste. As we live large, and extract the full measure of what it is to dive head-long into the great adventure, it is a wise practice, I think, to pause regularly and get down in writing one’s own thoughts about the meaning of life. In handing it on to those who matter most to us, and to whom we matter so much, we also stretch our own consciousness toward the transcendent and eternal verities.
The eulogy stands as a testament to our effect on and need for each other. The elegy stands as witness to the primacy of deep feeling and longing which is emblematically human. Together, they help make sure that these moments in our lives are also the stuff of epiphany.
© Brother Anton and The Harried Mystic, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
The Harried Mystic 
I have often recommended the writing of one’s own obituary to help coalesce what you want to be remembered for and what you still wish to accomplish.
A small confession though: I have yet to do it myself. I feel so overwhelmed with depression at the thought of how very little I know I have so far accomplished in my life.
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What many who have done so come to recognize, though, is that they’ve accomplished more than they first thought. Too often, autobiography is seen as a grand resume listing the many things achieved. Instead, I see it as a testament to life’s journey with all of its revelations: a record of experience and perspective, insight, foresight and hindsight all combined. Your blogs already attest to such extraordinary richness. The stories, the books and the posts are the spice that adds complex savor to what otherwise can seem prosaic and mundane.
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Hello, thanks for coming by and visiting my blog. I’m glad to have discovered yours. You write eloquently of the need to stop and reflect on where we have been. I’m very keen on the idea of writing our life stories, seeing the emerging themes and patterns, acting as witness to our journeys. I’ve done this at a few transition points of life, and more recently written it as a fairy tale. That was a profound experience.
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I’ve done it in my head and ended up feeling terrible; I’d hate to do it on paper and be faced with it in black and white.
but thank you for the kind words.
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