Eulogy examples for a father

Eleven days ago my father was on a ladder clearing a gutter and shouting at me about the bin collection. I want to start there, because I think we are all still standing in that week and it would be strange to pretend otherwise.

None of us got to say anything. There was no last conversation. I have thought about that a great deal and I have decided I am not going to be able to make it mean anything, so I am going to tell you about a photograph instead.

It is on the fridge. It has been on the fridge for nineteen years. It is objectively a terrible photograph — it is out of focus, someone’s thumb is in it, and my brother is blinking.

It is Whitby, 2007. We are all on a wall. Dad is wearing a coat he wore until 2019 despite being asked not to. He has got his arm out behind my mother, not around her, just out, along the wall, in that way he had of being near people without making a thing of it.

And he is laughing at something off to the left that none of us have ever identified.

That is my father. Slightly out of focus, in a bad coat, laughing at something nobody else can see, with his arm not quite around you but definitely there.

He was not a talker. He was a turner-up. He came to every single thing — every fixture, every school concert, one very poorly attended play in 2013 — and he never once made you feel it was an effort. He drove my brother to Leeds and back on the same day, twice, in February, and described this as “nothing.”

He could be a nightmare. He was incapable of admitting he did not know where he was going. He had strong views about other people’s driveways. He would not have a smartphone and made this everyone else’s problem for a decade.

I do not have a lesson from any of this. I have not got to the part where it makes sense and I am not sure I will.

What I have got is a bad photograph on a fridge, and a man who turned up, every time, for all of us.

Dad, the gutter is done. You did it. It was the last thing you did and it is done properly.

My dad had one joke. I want to be accurate about this: not one kind of joke, not a small repertoire. One joke. He told it at every birthday, every Christmas, and at both of my sisters’ weddings.

A man walks into a library and asks for a book on the Titanic. The librarian says, sorry, that one’s out. And my father would wait — he had extraordinary patience for a man with only one joke — and then he would say: it’ll come back up.

Nobody laughed. That was not the point. The point was that Dad was going to do it anyway, in front of forty people, at the wedding of his own child, because the doing of it was the whole thing.

He worked hard in a way I did not see until I was much older. Thirty-one years at the depot, mostly nights, and I have no memory of him complaining about it, which I now understand was a decision he made rather than a temperament he had.

What he taught me was not in anything he said. He gave advice roughly four times in his life and most of it was about tyres. Everything he meant, he did.

He drove to a netball tournament in Doncaster in 1998 that I had specifically asked him not to come to. He sat in the car park for two hours because I was embarrassed, and then he drove me home and did not mention it, and then he came to the next one.

When I failed my A-levels he did not do the speech. He made two cups of tea and put the football on and let me sit there for the length of a whole match without saying anything. That was the most useful thing anyone did for me that year.

He was not easy. He could not talk about anything that mattered without turning it into a job that needed doing, and when my mother was sick he fixed the guttering, twice, rather than sit in a room and say what he felt. I was angry with him about that for a long time. I am not any more.

That was him saying it. It was the only vocabulary he had.

My younger sister Bev said something this week that I have not stopped thinking about — that he made a very small life and then filled it completely.

Dad, the book came back up. I’m sorry nobody ever laughed. I’m laughing now.

My father came here in 1981 with about forty words of English, and he never entirely forgave the language for what it did next.

He learned it from the radio and from a man at work called Big Phil, which meant that for the whole of my childhood my father spoke fluent, confident, extremely Midlands English containing roughly nine words that do not exist.

He said “chimbley.” He was told, repeatedly, over four decades, by everyone. He said “chimbley” until Tuesday.

But here is the thing I have understood only this week. He did not care about being right. He cared about being understood, and he worked out very early that being understood is mostly about whether people want to listen to you.

So he was funny. He was funny in a second language, on purpose, from about 1983 onwards, because he had decided that was the way in.

Do you know how hard that is? I have one language and I am not half as funny as my father was in his second.

He got in. Forty years, a business, this room full of people.

Goodnight, Tata. The chimbley’s fine.

Doug was not my father, and he would want me to say that, because he was scrupulous about it for twenty-two years.

He arrived when I was fifteen, which is the worst possible age for somebody to arrive. I was horrible to him. I would like to put that on the record while there are witnesses. I was horrible to him for about two years, systematically, with real commitment.

He did not try to win me round. That is the thing I want to tell you about. He did not do the big gestures, he did not attempt to be anyone’s dad, and he never once said “I’m not trying to replace your father,” which is the sentence I was braced for.

He just kept being there, at a slight distance, being reasonable. For two years. While I was awful.

The turn came in 2004 and it was not dramatic. My car would not start and I rang him, at seven in the morning, because he was the person who would know. And he came, and he fixed it, and he did not say a single thing about the fact that I had rung him. He behaved as though I had always rung him.

I rang him about most things after that. For eighteen years I rang Doug.

He was a pedant. He was a genuinely difficult pedant about tools, about tyre pressure, about the correct way to stack a dishwasher, and he once sent a two-page letter to a garden centre.

But I have been thinking about what it takes to be patient with a hostile fifteen-year-old for two years with no guarantee it will ever pay off, and I do not think I could do it.

He was not my father. He was something else that does not really have a name, and it was chosen, every single day, by a man under no obligation whatsoever.

Thanks for waiting me out, Doug.