Husband Eulogy Examples

I was married to Frank Kowalski for forty-one years, and for forty-one years he told the story of how we met the same way: 'She was renting the flat above the hardware store, and I was in the hardware store. Very convenient.' That's the whole account, as delivered by Frank. What he left out is that he came into that store every Saturday for nine weeks before he managed to speak to me, and that I knew, because Sal behind the counter was giving me weekly reports on his progress. Frank thought he chose me. I let him believe it for four decades. Frank, love — you were scouted.

On our third date he gave me a bookshelf he'd built. It wobbled. He was mortified — this was a man who machined parts to a thousandth of an inch at the plant all week, and he'd made his girl a shelf that rocked like a rowboat. He tried to fix it in 1985. He tried to replace it in 1992, in 2003, and again in 2011. I never let him. It is standing in our hallway this morning, holding my cookbooks, wobbling, because some things you keep for being perfect and some things you keep because of who was nervous when he made them.

People ask what a long marriage is, and I can tell you: it isn't the anniversaries. It's that Frank was deaf in his right ear from the machine shop, so for forty years I walked on his left without thinking, the way you breathe — and all this week I have been standing on the wrong side of everything and couldn't work out why the world felt lopsided. It's coffee started before my alarm went off every morning since Reagan, mine poured first. It's a man who could not say 'I'm worried about you' to save his life, so he said it with projects instead. When Susan's marriage hit its rocks, he drove out and redid her gutters. When I found the lump — it was nothing, thank God, but for nine days we didn't know that — I came home from the biopsy to find him retiling the bathroom at two in the morning. 'I can't sit in that waiting room, Peg,' he said, up to his elbows in grout. 'But no water is ever coming through this floor again.' That was Frank's whole language. I became fluent. Our house is a forty-year love letter written in a leaky-gutter vocabulary.

He was not a modern man in every respect. He kept jars of screws labeled 'misc' — dozens of jars, all labeled 'misc,' a filing system with exactly one file. He kept every receipt since before our children were born, 'in case.' We have not parked a car in our own garage since 1994. He answered every major family question with 'we'll see,' which all of us knew meant no, and he danced at every wedding he ever attended without once locating the beat — and never cared, because I was the one in his arms, and he figured the beat was my department.

Every anniversary, he made me something. Year one, a spice rack. Year ten, the cedar chest. Year forty, a bench by the tomatoes, 'so you can sit down out there instead of kneeling in the dirt like a penitent.' This past year he was slower, and he was out in the garage more than usual, and he wouldn't say what for. Afterward — afterward, Danny and I found a small box on the workbench. Finished, sanded, waiting. On the lid he had carved 'Peg's — misc.' Inside: ticket stubs from 1983. A hairpin from our wedding day. And a receipt from the hardware store, dated the ninth Saturday, for one box of wood screws he never needed. He kept it forty-two years. In case.

Frank, here is my report, since for once you can't interrupt me. The shelf stays wobbly. I'll sit on the bench with the tomatoes, and I'll pour the first cup, and I will manage — because you built this family the way you built everything else, over-engineered, meant to outlast you. And wherever you are now, love, I hope somebody there knows to stand on your left. Tell them the story of how we met. Leave out the good parts. You always did.

I need to begin with the two people who aren't here, because Ray would insist. Ray loved his first wife, Carol, for thirty-two years, and I loved my Jim for twenty-eight, and when Ray and I married — me at sixty-two, him at sixty-four — we made a rule on the honeymoon: we do not compete with the ghosts. We set places for them. Nine years of Carol's pie recipe at Thanksgiving and Jim's terrible New Year's pun, because Ray said, 'Lil, we're not each other's second choice. We're each other's second miracle.' He taught high school chemistry for thirty-five years. He knew the difference between a substitution and a reaction.

We met because our daughters conspired without knowing it. His Karen and my Beth — who had never met — each signed a lonely widowed parent up for the beginners' ballroom class at the rec center. Same class. Same Tuesday. Ray was the tall one in the ironed shirt, counting under his breath: one-two-three, one-two-three. He counted through the entire six-week course. He counted at our wedding. He was still quietly counting last spring at Beth's wedding, into my hair. Thirty-five years of teaching teenagers to be careful with dangerous materials, and he never once trusted his own feet without the numbers. I loved the counting. It meant he was concentrating on not stepping on me. Sixty-four years old, and he treated a box step like it was something he'd been handed for safekeeping.

People our age don't get the luxury of wasting time, so we didn't. We had a rule — Ray was a great believer in rules with jokes hidden inside them — that only one of us was allowed to be miserable at a time. 'Take a ticket,' he'd say. 'I've got self-pity booked until four o'clock.' We went to Lisbon because a former student had once told him about the custard tarts, and to Nova Scotia because I said the word 'puffin' with too much enthusiasm. He proposed after ten months, in the pharmacy queue of all places, because — his words — 'At our age, Lil, a long engagement is just poor chemistry.' I said yes before he finished the sentence. I had been planning to propose that same weekend, and he never let me forget that he beat me to it by four days.

He was not flawless, and he would want the evidence presented. He made chemistry puns at a frequency no jury would forgive — every dinner I ever cooked was pronounced 'a solution.' He hummed while he ate, tunelessly, a habit Carol had apparently spent three decades failing to cure, and I want it on the record, Karen: I failed too. Your mother and I are united across eternity in that defeat. He corrected the apostrophes on restaurant menus with a pencil he carried for the purpose. And he took eleven minutes to tell any story containing a fact, because the fact needed context, and the context needed context, and by the end you had forgotten your question but somehow learned a great deal about phosphorus.

Some people have quietly wondered — kindly, but I have ears — whether nine years can really count next to thirty-two, or twenty-eight. Let me answer that. Ray and I didn't get the long version. We got the concentrate. We were the two people in any room who best understood exactly what a marriage costs to lose, so we knew the price of an ordinary Tuesday down to the penny — and we never once had an ordinary one.

Ray, my love, my second miracle: thank you for beating me to it by four days. Set the places for Carol and Jim, and set one for me — I'll be along when I'm along, so use the time to practice. One-two-three, one-two-three. Try not to count out loud, dear. And if you must — and you must, I know you — count slowly. I want to hear you concentrating when I get there.