Writing a Eulogy for Your Mom: Three Full Examples

My mother, Dolores, raised four children, two grandchildren, half the kids on Maple Street, and one extremely ungrateful parrot. If you ever wondered where her patience came from, so did she. 'I pray for it daily,' she used to say, usually while looking directly at one of us.

Mom was a school nurse for twenty-six years, which means there are hundreds of grown adults walking around this town who once sat on her cot with a fake stomachache, and she knew it was fake, and she let them stay anyway. 'Sometimes a kid just needs twenty minutes and a juice box,' she told me once. 'That's most of nursing. Honestly, that's most of everything.' I have been handing out the emotional equivalent of juice boxes my whole adult life because of her, and so has everyone she trained.

She was not a soft touch, though. Let the record show that Dolores held opinions. About hemlines. About people who don't return shopping carts. About my first husband — and I want to publicly acknowledge, twenty years too late, that she was right. She had a way of being right that drove us all crazy, because she never said 'I told you so.' She'd just make you a cup of tea and let the silence do it.

Here's my favorite imperfect thing about her: Mom could not sing. At all. A lifetime in the church choir, and the choir director — who is here today and can confirm — once asked her, with great kindness, if she might like to 'lead the alto section by example, silently.' She refused. She sang every Sunday for forty years, joyfully, terribly, at full volume. When I asked her once if she knew, she said, 'Of course I know. God gave me this voice; He can listen to it.' That was her whole philosophy of life in one sentence. You show up as you are, you give it the full volume, and you let heaven sort out the harmony.

The last few months were hard, and I won't pretend otherwise. But even in the hospital she was herself. She memorized the night nurses' names and their kids' names. She made the oncologist laugh so hard he had to leave the room. Three days before the end, she squeezed my hand and gave me her final instructions: 'Water my ferns. Be kind to your sister. And don't let them sing anything dreary at the funeral.'

Mom, the ferns are watered. I'm working on the sister part. And in a few minutes this congregation is going to sing your favorite hymn, off-key and at full volume, exactly the way you taught us. Thank you for the juice boxes. Thank you for the silence with the tea. Thank you for everything. Sing loud up there — He can listen to it.

When I told people my mother's name was Pilar, they'd sometimes ask what she was like, and for years I gave the lazy answer: 'She's a force of nature.' Standing here today, I want to be more precise, because she deserved precision. My mother was five foot one. She came to this country at nineteen with a suitcase and a cousin's address. She worked mornings in a bakery and nights cleaning offices until she could open her own little shop, and she ran that shop for thirty years. She was not a force of nature. Nature is random. My mother was a force of will.

She had rules, and the rules were not negotiable. Everyone eats. No exceptions — the mailman ate, my friends ate, the man who came to repossess the delivery van in 1994 ate, and then, somewhat confused, did not repossess the van. That actually happened. There are witnesses here. Mom always said the empanada did the negotiating.

She was tough on me, and I didn't always love it at the time. She checked my homework until I was seventeen. She once drove forty minutes to my college dorm because I'd sounded 'wrong' on the phone — and I was wrong; I'd been dumped and was living on cereal — and she didn't say a word about it, just cleaned the room while I talked, left a week of food in the freezer, and drove home. We never called it love, what she did. We called it Tuesday.

And she was funny — sharper than any of us. She learned English from soap operas and never lost the dramatic timing. When my sister announced her engagement, Mom paused a full five seconds, hand on heart, and said, 'Finally. I have already bought the dress.' She had. Two years earlier. It still fit.

Mom never wanted us to make a fuss about her, which is why I know she's somewhere right now critiquing these flowers and recalculating what we paid for them. So I'll close the way she'd want — practically. If my mother fed you, and statistically she did: pass it on. Feed somebody. Check on somebody who sounds wrong on the phone. Don't call it love if it embarrasses you. Call it Tuesday.

Te quiero, Mamá. The freezer is full. We learned.

My mom, Janet, kept a junk drawer in the kitchen, and I want to talk about it for two minutes, because I think it was the most honest map of who she was.

In that drawer, as of last Tuesday: spare buttons for coats we no longer own. A flashlight that works. Birthday candles, every number. Three decks of cards because 'people might want to play.' A church bulletin from my baptism. And taped inside the front edge, where she'd see it every day, a fortune from a cookie that said, 'You are someone's reason to smile.'

That was Mom. Prepared for everyone else's emergencies. Sentimental in secret. Always ready for company that might want to play cards. She never gave speeches about love — she stocked it, in a drawer, in a casserole, in the way she remembered what you were worried about and asked about it weeks later by name.

Mom, we found the fortune. You were right to keep it — you were the reason, for every single person in this room. We'll keep the drawer stocked. We'll keep the candles, every number. And when people come over, we'll ask if they want to play. Thank you. We love you. Rest well.