Maybe a eulogy should be written early, years early-before the actual need. It would be an awkward exercise, to be sure. There’s a directness to a eulogy, a forthrightness, an honesty that’s missing from daily discourse. After all, this is it. There’s no room for correction, improvement, editing. This is the summing-up of a life. Literally, the final word.
It would be different if the eulogy’s subject were there to listen-to take comfort from the kind words of remembrance; to reap the harvest of affection; to see reflected in the eulogy’s words his or her place in history, in life; to learn lessons from the sting of sarcasm.
Of course, it just wouldn’t do. We aren’t built to talk quite so honestly to each other. And we aren’t built to hear fulsome praise and veiled (or not-so-veiled) criticism with perfect equanimity. And, really, how much difference would it make? Would Marilyn Monroe have been happier if she had known that Diana Trilling was captivated by her innocence? Or would England’s Queen Anne have turned over a new leaf if the Duchess of Marlboro had told her to her face how gross she was?
Still, the fascinating thing about eulogies is that they are more about life than about death. And they’re for the living, not for the dead. Each eulogy-whether hagiographic or snide or heartfelt or perfunctory-is an object lesson for those left behind.
In each death, we learn better how to live. Or, at least, we try.
That’s the inescapable conclusion after reading “The Book of Eulogies,” collected and edited by Phyllis Theroux, to be published Memorial Day by Scribner & Sons ($26). The book contains more than 100 eulogies of people famous and not. Most were, on balance, agreeable people-at least according to their eulogists. But even the stinkers had something to say to us, if only by showing the way not to go.
It is a rich book, a work in which the insights about life and death-and the emotions of love and loss-build as eulogist after eulogist grapples with the core question of what it all means. Ghoulish? Not at all. This is the liveliest of writing. Here, from Theroux’s book, are some examples:
`One day, as I was ending a visit to his hospital room, I sat down on the bed and leaned over his big old body and hugged him for awhile, saying into the bedcovers that I wished there was something I could do for him. He had an answer. “Just love me,” he said. I do.’
William C. Trueheart (1918-1992), eulogized by his son Charles Trueheart
Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886)
Eulogized by Susan Gilbert Dickinson, her sister-in-law
`To her, life was rich, and aglow with God and immortality. With no creed, no formulated faith, hardly knowing the names of dogmas, she walked this life with the gentleness and reverence of old saints, with the firm step of martyrs who sing while they suffer.
Gertrude Selzer
(withheld)
Eulogized by her son Richard Selzer
`When it came, that last breath, it was as though a lamp in whose circle of light I had lived all my life had been extinguished. Now I was free to live anywhere. In the dark.”
Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862)
Eulogized by Ralph Waldo Emerson
`He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the state; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose wisely, no doubt, for himself to be the bachelor of thought and nature. He had no talent for wealth, and knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance.”
Kitty O’Connell Quindlen
(1898-1987)
Eulogized by her granddaughter Anna Quindlen
`My grandmother was rather vain, and I loved her for it. Her favorite stories concerned her own charms: how she weighed 96 pounds until the third of her eight children was born, how some man tried to pick her up on the street even though she was pushing a baby carriage with a toddler on either side of it, how the nicest boys clamored to date her, particularly August LaForte, he of the wonderful manners and fine clothes. Once I asked her why she had chosen instead the rather dour young man, as she described him, who was my grandfather. `I don’t know,’ she said with a sigh. `I don’t think I could have hardly stood him at all if he hadn’t played the piano.’ “
Ulysses S. Grant
(1822-1885)
Eulogized by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher
`He was a good subaltern, a poor farmer, a worse tanner, a worthless (merchant). Without civil experience, literary gifts, too diffident to be ambitious, too modest to put himself forward, too honest to be a politician, he was of all men the least likely to attain eminence, and absolutely unfitted, apparently, for preeminence; yet God’s providence selected him. . . .
“Had Grant died at the tan-yard, or from behind the counter, the world would never had suspected that it had lost a hero. He would have fallen as an undistinguishable leaf among the millions cast down every year. His time had not come. . . . It was coming!”
Yhitzak Rabin
(1922-1995)
Eulogized by his 17-year-old granddaughter Noa Ben-Artzi Philosof `Grandfather, you were the pillar of fire in front of the camp and now we are left in the camp alone, in the dark; and we are so cold and so sad. I know that people talk in terms of a national tragedy, and of comforting an entire nation, but we feel the huge void that remains in your absence when grandmother doesn’t stop crying. . . .
“Others greater than I have already eulogized you, but none of them ever had the pleasure I had to feel the caresses of your warm, soft hands, to merit your warm embrace that was reserved only for us, to see your half-smile that always told me so much, that same smile which is no longer, frozen in the grave with you….The ground has been swept out from below us, and we are groping now, trying to wander about in this empty void, without any success so far.”
Marilyn Monroe
(1926-1962)
Eulogized by Diana Trilling
`Even while she symbolized an extreme of experience, of sexual knowingness, she took each new circumstance of life, as it came to her or as she sought it, like a newborn babe. And yet this was what made her luminous-her innocence. The glow was not rubbed off her by her experience of the ugliness of life because finally, in some vital depth, she had been untouched by it.”
Queen Anne of England
(1665-1714)
Eulogized by Sarah, Duchess of Marlboro
`Queen Anne had a person and appearance not at all ungraceful, till she grew exceedingly gross and corpulent. There was something of majesty in her look, but mixed with a sudden and constant frown, that plainly betrayed a gloominess of soul and a cloudiness of disposition within. She seemed to inherit a good deal of her father’s moroseness. . . .
“Her love the prince seemed in the eye of the world to be prodigiously great; and great as was the passion of her grief, her stomach was greater, for that very day he died she ate three very large and hearty meals, so that one would think that as other persons’ grief takes away their appetites, her appetite took away her grief.”
George Washington
(1732-1799)
Eulogized by Thomas Jefferson
`His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion. . . . His heart was not warm in its affections; but he exactly calculated every man’s value, and gave him a solid esteem proportioned to it. . . .”
Burghardt Du Bois
(1897-1899)
Eulogized by his father, W.E.B. Du Bois
`He died at eventide, when the sun lay like a brooding sorrow above the western hills, veiling its face; when the winds spoke not, and the trees, the great green trees he loved, stood motionless. I saw his breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that travels in the night and left a world of darkness in its train. The day changed not; the same tall trees peeped in at the windows, the same green grass glinted in the setting sun. Only in the chamber of death writhed the world’s most piteous thing–a childless mother.”
Minnie Marx
(1864-1931)
Eulogized by drama critic Alexander Woollcott
`Last week the Marx Brothers buried their mother. . . . Minnie Marx was a wise, tolerant, generous, gallant matriarch. In the passing of such a one, a woman full of years, with her work done, and children and grandchildren to hug her memory all their days, you have no more of a sense of death than you have when the Hudson–sunlit, steady, all-conquering–leaves you behind on the shore on its way to the fathomless sea.”
Annie Lee
Eulogized by her son Laurie Lee
`With her love of finery, her unmade beds, her litters of unfinished scrapbooks, her taboos, superstitions and prudishness, her remarkable dignity, her pity for the persecuted, her awe of the gentry, and her detailed knowledge of the family trees of all the Royal Houses of Europe, she was a disorganized mass of unreconciled denials, a servant girl born to the silk. Yet in spite of all this, she fed our oafish wits with steady, imperceptible shocks of beauty . . .
“Nothing now that I ever see that has the edge of gold around it–the change of a season, a jeweled bird in a bush, the eyes of orchids, water in the evening, a thistle, a picture, a poem–but my pleasure pays some brief duty to her. She tried me at times to the top of my bent. But I absorbed from birth, as now I know, the whole earth through her jaunty spirit.”
Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi
(1869-1948)
Eulogized by Jawaharlal Nehru
`Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere. I do not know what to tell you and how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the father of the nation, is no more.”
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(1841-1919)
Eulogized by his son, Jean, the filmmaker
`The painter) now dominated Nature, which all his life he had served as a worshiper. In return, she had finally taught him to see beyond surface appearances; and, like herself, to create a world out of almost nothing. With a little water, a few minerals, and invisible radiations, Nature creates an oak tree, a forest. From a passionate embrace beings are born. Birds multiply, fish force their way upstream, the rays of the sun illumine and quicken all this stirring mass. . . .
“This profusion of riches which poured forth from Renoir’s austere palette is overwhelming in the last picture he painted, on the morning of his death. An infection which had developed in his lungs kept him to his room. He asked for his paintbox and brushes, and he painted the anemones which Nenette, our kindhearted maid, had gone out and gathered for him. For several hours he identified himself with these flowers and forgot his pain. Then he motioned for someone to take his brush and said, `I think I am beginning to understand something about it.’ . . . He died in the night.”
Pope John XXIII
(1881-1963)
Eulogized by Cardinal Leon Joseph Suenens
`John’s spontaneous, forthright, ever-alert goodness was like a ray of sunshine which dispels fog, which melts the ice, which filters its way through, as of a right, without even being noticed. Such a ray of sunshine creates optimism along its path, spreads happiness with its unexpected appearance, and makes light of all obstacles . . .
“He will be for history the pope of welcome and hope. This is the reason his gentle and holy memory will remain in benediction in the centuries to come. At his departure, he left men closer to God, and the world a better place for men to live.”
Three young girls killed by a bomb thrown in a church
(1963)
Eulogized by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
`Death comes to every individual. There is an amazing democracy about death. It is not aristocracy for some of the people, but a democracy for all of the people. Kings die and beggars die; rich men die and poor men die; old people die and young people die; death comes to the innocent and it comes to the guilty. Death is the irreducible common denominator of all men.”
Peter Benjamin Weisman
(1964-1980)
Eulogized by his mother, Mary-Lou Weisman
`Now, at the last moment, I get it. It’s not for you I will mourn, who, dying when you were done but not defeated, died on time. But what about me? What about me, sentenced for life to be free of the literal burden of you, yet condemned and exalted to never forgetting. The burden of having you will turn into the burden of missing you. . . .”
Lawrence of Arabia
(1888-1935)
Eulogized by Winston Churchill
`The world naturally looks with some awe upon a man who apppears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension that here is someone outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; someone strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammeled by convention, moving independently of the ordinary currents of human action; a being readily capable of violent revolt or supreme sacrifice; a man, solitary, austere, to whom existence is no more than a duty, yet a duty to be faithfully discharged. . . . He was not in complete harmony with the normal.”
