Grandmother Eulogy Examples

My grandmother, Rose Caldwell, never once in her ninety-one years arrived anywhere empty-handed. If you invited Grandma Rose to dinner, she brought a pie. If you were sick, she brought soup and a crossword book. If you were graduating, getting married, or just having a bad week, she showed up at your door with a Tupperware container and the absolute certainty that whatever was wrong, it would look smaller after you'd eaten something. So it feels strange to stand here today with nothing in my hands but a few pages, trying to give back even a little of what she gave us.

Grandma was born in 1934 on a dairy farm outside Lancaster, the fourth of seven children, and she carried that farm with her for the rest of her life. She could not walk past a wilting plant without stopping to deal with it — including, famously, in other people's yards. She kept a vegetable garden until she was eighty-eight, and she judged every tomato in every grocery store against her own and found them all wanting. When she moved into her apartment at Maple Court, she negotiated with the manager for the sunniest window so her African violets wouldn't suffer. The violets, I want to report, are thriving. They will be coming home with me.

She was not a perfect woman, and she would be irritated with me if I stood up here and pretended she was. She was stubborn in a way that the family politely called 'determined.' She held a grudge against a casserole dish that my aunt Carol failed to return in 1987, and she mentioned it — cheerfully, but pointedly — at every Thanksgiving for nearly forty years. Carol, she told me last spring that she knew exactly where it was and didn't actually want it back. She just enjoyed the bit. That was Grandma: even her grudges were a kind of love.

What I will remember most is her kitchen table. It was nothing special — Formica, a little wobbly, with a sugar bowl shaped like a hen. But everything important in my life happened at that table. I learned to play gin rummy there, and learned that Grandma did not let children win. I told her about my first heartbreak there, and she let me cry for exactly as long as I needed, then dealt the cards and said, 'He had weak handshakes anyway.' When I called off my first engagement and was afraid to tell anyone, I told her first, at that table, and she said, 'Good. Now you'll marry someone you actually like.' She was right. She was almost always right, and she almost never said I told you so, which may be the rarest virtue there is.

Grandma Rose was married to my grandfather, Frank, for fifty-three years, and she missed him every day of the seventeen years since he died. She didn't talk about it much. But she kept his reading glasses in the drawer by her chair, and once, when I asked her why, she said, 'Because some things you don't get over. You just get on.' I think that's the best advice she ever gave me, and she gave it without knowing she was giving it.

We will get on, Grandma. We'll plant the tomatoes, we'll play the cards as dealt, and we'll show up at each other's doors with food when things go wrong. You taught us how. Thank you for every pie, every crossword, every hand of rummy you refused to throw. We love you. Save us a seat at the table.

For those who don't know me, I'm Marcus, Evelyn's oldest grandson — or, as she introduced me to every single person at St. Agnes for thirty years, 'my Marcus, the one who fixed my television.' I fixed that television once. In 2009. I unplugged it and plugged it back in. Nana told that story like I had personally invented electricity, and that tells you almost everything you need to know about her: she was your biggest fan before you had done anything to deserve a fan.

Nana Evelyn raised three kids mostly on her own after Grandpa passed young, working twenty-six years as a school cafeteria cook at Roosevelt Elementary. There are people in this room today — grown adults with kids of their own — who came up to me this morning and said she used to slip them extra rolls when they didn't have lunch money. She never told us that. We found out at her retirement party, when half the school district showed up. She fed people quietly her whole life and acted like it was nothing, and I have come to understand that it was everything.

She was also, and I say this with enormous respect, the most competitive woman I have ever met. Bingo at the senior center was not a hobby for Nana. It was a campaign. She had lucky daubers. She had a lucky seat, and heaven help the visitor who took it. One Christmas we bought her one of those electronic bingo machines and she returned it because, quote, 'it takes the skill out of it.' Nana, there is no skill in bingo. We all knew that. Nobody ever once said it to her face, because we are not brave people, and because she would have found a way to win the argument too.

Here's what I keep coming back to this week. When I was nineteen, I dropped out of college. I was ashamed to tell my parents, so I drove to Nana's and sat on her porch, and she came out with two glasses of sweet tea and didn't say anything for a long time. Then she said, 'You know I left school at sixteen.' I said I knew. She said, 'And do you think I'm stupid?' I said no, ma'am. She said, 'Then stop deciding what your whole life means at nineteen. Drink your tea.' I went back to school two years later, on my own terms, and she sat in the front row at graduation in a hat so big the people behind her had to lean. She would want you to know the hat was on sale.

Nana didn't leave us much in the way of things. A house full of church cookbooks, a recipe for biscuits that none of us can replicate even though we watched her a hundred times, and a closet of hats that could shade a small village. But she left forty years of fed children, three kids who all turned out kind, seven grandchildren who never once doubted they were loved, and a front-row example of how to live: show up, feed people, claim your seat, and cheer the loudest for your family even when they've only unplugged a television.

Rest easy, Nana. The seat by the window is yours forever, and nobody — nobody — is touching your daubers.