He stood at the podium for eleven minutes
and told us who his father was in ways
we hadn’t known, the interior limits
of the man revealed in those eleven praise-
and-truth-filled minutes, the story of the argument
at eighteen that they’d never fully solved,
the fishing trip when he was young and meant
to say something and hadn’t, the resolved
and unresolved, the whole honest account.
The eulogy is the last gift that we give,
the summing up of how the dead man lived,
and the best ones aren’t polished or pristine
but honest in the way that death cuts clean
to cut away the comfortable and sieve.
I’ve heard eulogies that were lies entire,
polished stories of a saint who wasn’t one,
and I’ve heard eulogies that lit a fire
of recognition in the room, undone
by the specific truth of who the person was,
the habits and the arguments and the jokes,
the failings that become the applause
of recognition when the honest speaker invokes.
I’ve been asked to write mine in advance
so the people at my funeral have something true,
so they aren’t left to improvise a dance
of polite memory, so they get a view
of what I actually thought about the years,
the things I got right and the things I fumbled,
the loves that justified the fears,
the way the whole thing worked when it was humbled.