Eulogy Examples for a Sister

My sister Nora was four years older than me, which meant that for the whole of my childhood she was legally in charge — a position she assumed at age six and never formally resigned. Last month, at sixty-one, she was still telling me to put a coat on. I am wearing one today, Nora. There are witnesses everywhere. I hope you're satisfied.

Our mother worked the early shift at the canning plant, so it was Nora who got me ready for school. Every morning she dragged the yellow kitchen chair to the window for the light, put a towel around my shoulders like a cape, and braided my hair with the brush held in her teeth and one instruction, always the same: 'Hold still.' I heard those two words from my sister for fifty-seven years. Hold still while I fix your hair, your hem, your makeup, your résumé, your life. She was ten years old the first time she said it, standing over me in her school socks, and she was already exactly who she was going to be: somebody whose hands were never finished taking care of you.

She left school at seventeen and swept floors at Carla's House of Beauty until Carla let her near a customer, and by thirty she had her own salon on Chestnut Street with her name in gold letters on the glass. Twenty-six years of Nora's. Half the women in this room got their wedding hair done in that second chair. She did prom updos for girls who couldn't pay and invented a 'student discount' that existed for no one else. Every Monday, her day off, she took her scissors to the nursing home on Elm and did shampoo-and-sets for ladies who hadn't had a proper appointment in years. And I'll tell you the thing she never told anyone: for two decades, when Fitzgerald's funeral home called, Nora went. She fixed the hair of people who had passed, before their families came to see them, because — she said this to me exactly once — 'everybody deserves to look like themselves one last time.' She never charged. Mr. Fitzgerald is here today. He can tell you.

I don't want to make her sound like a saint, because she would hate that, and because it isn't accurate. Nora was constitutionally incapable of keeping a gift secret — every Christmas Eve of my life she would sidle up and say something like, 'I'm not telling you what it is, but you're going to need batteries.' She had opinions about haircuts obtained at other salons and shared them, unsolicited, sometimes with strangers in the supermarket. And she had been 'borrowing' my clothes since 1974 without returning a single item; there is a green cardigan in her closet right now that I have decided she can keep. But when my marriage fell apart nine years ago, it was Nora who appeared at my door at ten at night with a bottle of wine and her scissors, sat me down in my own kitchen, towel around my shoulders, and gave me the best haircut of my life while I cried. 'Hold still.' She didn't say one word against Gary until the exact moment the haircut was finished — she was a professional — at which point she set down the scissors and said several, all of them accurate.

Katie, Bridget — your mother kept an envelope in the till of the salon. It's marked 'the girls, first haircuts,' and inside there's a lock of hair from each of you, taped to a card with the date, from the days she cut your baby curls in that same second chair. She showed it to me every few years, the way other people show off holiday photos. Whatever else was in that till, the envelope was the treasure. It's yours now.

The yellow chair is still in our mother's kitchen, and I don't know what to do with the fact that nobody will ever stand behind it again. Nora and I never once said 'I love you' out loud — we weren't that kind of family. We said it in braids and hems and haircuts, in hold still and put a coat on. So let me say it her way, with witnesses: hold still, Nora, just once, while I look at you properly. You were in charge the whole time. You did a beautiful job.

My sister Angie drove a school bus for this town for twenty-nine years, and if you ever rode her route you already know the two things I'm going to talk about: the mirror and the whistle. She could see everything in that long mirror — everything, always, before it happened — and she had a two-finger whistle that could stop a fight, a dog, or traffic. I'm her little brother. I spent fifty years in that mirror. It was the safest place I've ever been.

Angie was six years older, and when Dad died — I was eight — she appointed herself to the position our family needed and never discussed it with anyone. She walked me to school. She learned to cook three dinners and rotated them for years without apology. And when it got dark and I was still out on my bike somewhere, that whistle would come over the neighborhood — two fingers, one long blast — and every kid on four streets would say, 'Russo, you're wanted.' You could hear it from the creek. You could hear it, I swear, from the next county. It meant: come home. Somebody's watching. Somebody noticed you're not back yet.

She raised two kids of her own with Sal, drove Route 6 through twenty-nine winters without a single accident, and became a legend in a job people don't usually build legends around. Grown men with beards still stopped her in the supermarket to say, 'Hi, Miss Angie.' She knew which kids on her route got breakfast at home and which didn't, and there was a box of granola bars under her seat for the ones who didn't — every year, out of her own pocket — and she'd have denied it furiously if you ever brought it up, so nobody did. The district gave her a plaque when she retired. She used it to prop open the garage door. That was Angie's exact relationship with recognition.

She was not a gentle legend. Angie cheated at Uno — flagrantly, against children, against her own grandchildren — and when caught she would look you dead in the eye and say, 'Prove it.' She held a grudge against Ed Brennan over a lawnmower for twenty-two years, and at his retirement party she gave a toast so warm that only our family knew it contained no retraction of any kind. And she never in her life asked how you were doing; she found out through the mirror instead. The year my marriage was ending, the year I wasn't telling anyone anything, I got into my truck one morning and found an envelope in the glovebox. Cash, and a note in her handwriting: 'Not a loan. Shut up.' We never spoke of it, ever. That was how my sister said the important things — past you, sideways, where you couldn't argue.

The last time I heard the whistle was at my son's graduation in June. Danny crossed the stage, and down from the bleachers came that same two-finger blast, sixty years of practice behind it, embarrassing and glorious, and half the crowd turned around while the other half — the half that grew up here — just smiled, because they knew what it meant. A Russo was wanted. Angie had noticed. Angie was watching.

I've been practicing the whistle all week. I'm not there yet — Sal can confirm the neighbors' complaints. But I'll get it, Ang, because somebody in this family has to be able to call the others home, and you left me the job the same way you took it: without discussing it with anyone. Sit down back there, all of you. She can still see us. She always could.