Eulogy examples

My mother kept a bag by the front door. It was canvas, it had a broken zip for at least fifteen years, and it was never empty.

Inside it, at any given moment: a cardigan in case someone was cold. Plasters. A bag of those boiled sweets nobody actually likes. A paperback she had already read. Two apples. Once, memorably, a hammer, for reasons she would not explain.

I used to find it embarrassing. I was fifteen and I wanted a mother who travelled light. It took me until my twenties to understand what that bag actually was, which is that my mother went through the world expecting to be needed, and she intended to be ready.

She was ready when my friend Rosie’s parents split up and Rosie lived with us for five months and Mum never once made her feel like a guest. She was ready every Wednesday for eleven years driving Joan Petherick to her hospital appointments, which she described as “no bother, I was going anyway,” which was not true, she was never going anyway. She was ready at two in the morning in a hospital car park in 2019 when I rang her and could not explain why I was crying, and she did not ask me to. She just talked about the garden until I could breathe.

She was not soft. She had strong opinions about most things and all of her neighbours. She could end a conversation by putting a plate down slightly too hard. If you were late she did not mention it, which was worse.

But she noticed. That was her whole way of being in the world. She noticed who was quiet at a party, who had lost weight, who had not been asked. And then she did something about it, quietly, without ever once making it a story about herself.

I have started carrying a bag. It is not canvas and the zip works, and I am aware this is not the same thing. But there are plasters in it, and a cardigan, and I find I am looking around rooms the way she did, to see who needs something.

Thank you, Mum. I am so glad you were ready. I wish you had needed less looking after at the end than you gave everybody else.

My grandmother taught me to play cards when I was six, and she never once let me win.

My parents found this outrageous. She was completely unrepentant. She said that a win you were given was worth nothing and that I would work it out. It took me until I was nine. I remember the exact afternoon, because when I finally beat her she put the cards down, looked at me over her glasses and said, “Well. There you are.” And that was it. That was the whole celebration. I have never been prouder of anything in my life.

That was Nana. She did not hand things to you. She expected you to be capable and then waited, sometimes for years, until you were.

She did it with my mother, and with me, and in the last few years, slowly and with enormous patience, with my daughter — who is seven, and who has not beaten her yet, and who is furious about it.

The cards are still at the house. We are going to keep playing. And when Ivy finally wins, I am going to put the cards down and look at her over my glasses and say, “Well. There you are.”

I met Danny in 2004 because he sat down at my table in a canteen, uninvited, and told me I was eating my sandwich wrong.

I want to be clear that we had never spoken. He had opinions about my sandwich technique and he felt they could not wait. That was the entire personality, delivered in one go, in the first eleven seconds.

Danny was the most confidently wrong man I have ever known. He once argued for forty minutes that Portugal was an island. He gave me directions to his own house that added an hour to the journey and then said the sat nav had been “got at.” He believed, genuinely, that he could sing.

He could not sing. I am saying that here, in a church, in front of his mother, because he would want the record to be accurate.

But here is the thing about a man who is that certain. When you were in trouble, Danny had no doubt whatsoever about what to do, and he did it immediately. When my marriage ended he was at my flat within two hours with a takeaway I had not asked for and no intention of discussing it, and he stayed four days. When Nadia was in hospital he organised a rota of eleven people, most of whom did not know each other, and it did not occur to him that this was a difficult thing to do.

He was not careful with himself and he was extraordinarily careful with the rest of us.

Twenty-two years. I have a folder on my phone of voice notes from him that are, without exception, too long. He would leave four minutes of audio to tell me a thing that would fit in a text message. I have listened to a lot of them this week.

I would give anything for one more voice note. Four minutes. Six. Whatever he liked.

Goodbye, mate. You were wrong about almost everything and you were right about the only thing that counted, which is that you turn up for people.

Michael and I were married for forty-one years. I am not going to be able to say very much, so I have chosen carefully.

He made tea for me every morning of those forty-one years. Not most mornings. Every morning. Too strong, always, and I stopped mentioning it in about 1989.

He was not a talker. People sometimes mistook that for coldness and they were wrong. He showed you where you stood by what he did with his time. He drove our daughter to Newcastle and back in a day, twice, without being asked. He sat with his brother every Thursday for two years and never described it as anything.

When I was ill in 2011 he did not say a single reassuring thing to me. Not one. He just did not leave. He read the paper in a plastic chair for nine days, and when I woke up at odd hours he was there, and he would say, “All right,” and go back to reading.

I have thought a great deal this week about what I would say to him if I had five more minutes, and the truth is I would not say anything remarkable. We would sit in the kitchen. He would make the tea too strong. That would be enough. That was always enough.

Thank you all for coming. He would have hated the fuss.

I am speaking today for the twenty-six of us who worked alongside Priya, and I want to start by saying the obvious thing rather than stepping around it. None of us were ready. We saw her on the Friday. There is a mug on her desk that nobody has been able to move.

I do not have anything wise to say about that, and I am not going to pretend to.

What I do have is fourteen years of watching her work, and one thing I want her family to know, because you may not have seen this side of her.

Priya was the person who explained things. Not in a superior way — in the way where she assumed you were clever and just had not been told yet. She rescued every nervous new starter we hired. Eleven people in this room were trained by her, unofficially, in corridors, because she noticed they were drowning and nobody had been assigned to help.

She had a phrase for it. If you apologised for asking her something obvious, she would say, “How would you know? Nobody told you.” I have heard three different people say that sentence this week without realising where they got it.

That is what I want to leave you with, because it is the part that has outlived her already. She made a place where it was safe not to know something. Anyone who has worked somewhere that was not like that will understand what a rare and deliberate thing it is.

To her family: she talked about you constantly and we all felt we knew you. We are so sorry.

Priya, thank you. We will keep saying your sentence to the new ones.

My father and I did not find each other easy. Many of you know that, and I am not going to stand here and describe a man none of us would recognise.

So I want to tell you about the water.

He taught me to swim at the lido in the summer of 1988, when I was six and completely terrified. And in the water he was a different person — patient in a way I did not otherwise see, endlessly patient, three weeks of Saturdays with his hand flat under my back saying “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, you’re fine.” He never once got frustrated with me. Not once. And I was a difficult child to teach.

I have thought about those Saturdays more than almost anything else in the last week. Because whatever else was true between us, that was also true, and it was not nothing. He gave me a thing I have had every day since. I swim most weeks. I taught my own son, in the same way, with the same sentence, and I did not notice I was doing it until I heard my own voice say it.

I do not know how to sum up my father and I am not going to try. But I can tell you that he was a good teacher in the water, that he was kind to me there, and that I am grateful.

Rest well, Dad.