Eulogy Examples for a Best Friend

I met Danny Whitaker in September of 1989, when he traded me a bag of chips for half my sandwich and then, with the confidence of a Wall Street raider, informed me he'd gotten the better end of the deal. He was nine. We were best friends for thirty-six years, and I want to state for the record, in front of his whole family, that he never stopped believing he got the better end of every deal — including, somehow, our friendship. Danny, you were wrong about that one. I got the better end. I always knew it.

If you grew up on Sycamore Street, you knew Danny. He was the kid with the loudest bike, the first one off the rope swing at the quarry, and the architect of the legendary tree fort that — and his mother is hearing this for the first time today, I'm sorry, Mrs. Whitaker — was built almost entirely from lumber borrowed from the Hendersons' garage renovation. 'Borrowed' was Danny's word. The Hendersons moved away in 1994 and the statute of limitations has expired, so let it now be told.

Everyone here knows what Danny became: a husband to Renee who still got nervous before their anniversary dinners, a father who coached Little League with terrifying intensity for a man whose own batting average we do not discuss, a guy who ran an HVAC business where half the older customers got mysteriously generous discounts every winter. But I knew the rough drafts of Danny. I knew the sixteen-year-old who practiced asking Renee out on me — playing the part of Renee was not the highlight of my high school career, but the performance clearly worked. I knew the twenty-five-year-old who sat in my truck outside the bank, terrified, before signing the loan for the business. He said, 'What if I lose everything?' I said, 'Then you'll come live in my garage and fix my air conditioning forever.' He laughed, and went in, and signed.

Danny was not a perfect man. He was constitutionally incapable of arriving anywhere on time — we told him this service started at one-thirty, just in case. He believed every problem could be fixed with duct tape or a group text, and he was usually right, which made him insufferable. And he never, ever, let you carry anything heavy alone. Couches, coffins, bad news, divorces — if you had weight, Danny showed up to take a corner of it. Half this room has a moving-day story about Danny. The other half has the other kind of story, the one you don't tell out loud, where he sat with you in the worst week of your life and didn't try to fix it, just stayed.

Thirty-six years gives you a private language. Danny and I could have a whole conversation in three words and a look. So I've been dreading the part of this where I have to say goodbye, because we never once said anything that sincere to each other — it would have ruined our whole thing. He'd want me to land a joke here. So: Danny, you finally found a way to get out of helping me move next month. Well played.

I'll look after Renee and the kids. I'll keep the group text going. And every time I see a tree fort built suspiciously well, I'll think of you, brother. The deal was always in my favor. Thanks for never noticing.

People assume best friends come from childhood. Priya Nair and I met eleven years ago in a conference room, on the worst project either of us ever worked on, when she slid a Post-it note across the table during hour three of a meeting that said, simply, 'Blink twice if you need rescuing.' I blinked twice. She invented a fake client call, walked me out of the building, and bought me a coffee, and that was that. Some friendships take decades to build. Ours took one Post-it note.

Priya was the most deliberately alive person I have ever known. She kept a list on her phone called 'Things Worth Leaving the House For,' and she consulted it like scripture. Thunderstorms were on it. Dumplings were on it, multiple times, with addresses. So was 'any body of water,' which is how I ended up swimming in a freezing lake in October two years ago while she stood on the dock yelling encouragement, fully dry, because — as she explained afterward, wrapped in the blanket she had brought for me — the list said leave the house, it didn't say get in.

She was brilliant at her work, and I'll let her colleagues speak to that. What I want to speak to is the hours after work. Priya was the friend who remembered the thing you mentioned once — the audition, the biopsy, the difficult phone call with your mother — and texted you that morning: 'Today's the day. Report back.' She held the details of dozens of lives in her head and made every single one of us feel like the main character. I found out this week, talking to people in this room, just how many of us were getting those texts. I thought I was special. It turns out we all were. That math shouldn't work, and with Priya it always did.

She was also — and she would want this said — a catastrophically bad cook who threw elaborate dinner parties anyway. We came for her, not the food. We learned to eat first. She knew. She didn't care. 'The lasagna is a gathering mechanism,' she told me once, scraping a smoking pan into the trash, 'not a meal.' That sentence is the whole woman: she understood that the point of everything was the people, and she built her life accordingly.

The last thing on her list, the last entry, added a few months ago, was 'sunrise, with someone.' Not sunrise alone. With someone. Priya never once wanted the beautiful thing without somebody beside her to elbow and say, look at that.

So that's how I’ll grieve her, because it's how she would have organized it. I'm keeping the list. I'm adding to it. And the next time something is worth leaving the house for — a thunderstorm, dumplings, a freezing lake in October — I will go, and I will bring someone, and I will hear her on the dock, yelling encouragement, dry and delighted and absolutely right about everything. Report back, Priya. Wherever you are. Report back.