Eulogy examples for a grandmother

My grandmother kept every button. Not most buttons. Every button, from every garment, since approximately 1961, in a Quality Street tin that weighed about the same as a small dog.

When something needed a button she would get the tin down and tip it out on the table and go through it with one finger, and it took forever, and she would not be hurried, and she never once failed to find one that worked.

I asked her why she kept them all. She looked at me as though I had asked something genuinely stupid and said, “Because they’re buttons.”

I thought it was hoarding. It was not hoarding. It was somebody who grew up with nothing and understood, in a way I have never had to, that a thing which still works should not be thrown away because it has come loose.

She did that with people too. I will not embarrass anyone by saying who.

I have got the tin. It is on my kitchen table and it is still ridiculous.

Thank you, Grandma. There is a button in there for everything.

I knew my great-grandmother for twenty-eight years, which sounds like a lot until you work out that it is less than a third of her.

So this week I went and asked about the rest, and I want to tell you about 1947, because none of us under sixty knew any of this.

In 1947 Lena was nineteen and she worked in a canning factory, and she was, by all accounts, extremely difficult. My great-aunt Rosalia used the word “impossible,” with what I would describe as admiration.

She organised a walkout. Nineteen years old. Over the temperature in the packing room, which had been thirty-four degrees for a fortnight and had put two women in hospital. She got sixty of them out for eleven days and she got the fans, and she was not thanked for it, and she was moved to a worse shift for two years afterwards.

I have known this woman my entire life and I did not know that. She never mentioned it. Not once, to any of us.

The grandmother I knew was very small and very old and sat in the corner at every family thing making short, devastating observations about people, some of whom were still in the room. She missed nothing. She once told my girlfriend, on meeting her, that she looked tired, and then, forty minutes later, that she liked her.

People keep saying she had a good innings. Ninety-eight is a good innings. But I would like us to be sad anyway, if that is all right, because I do not think the length of it makes any difference to the fact that there is a chair in that corner and she is not in it.

She got the fans. Sixty women, eleven days, nineteen years old, and she never told anyone.

Bisabuela — we know now. Somebody should have told us sooner.

Thank you for the fans.

Some of you know this and some of you do not, so I will say it at the start: my grandmother raised me. From when I was four. She was fifty-eight and she had just finished raising three of her own, and she did it again anyway without any discussion I was ever aware of.

I have been trying all week to find the story that proves what she was, and I could not, because there is not one. That is the whole problem with what she did. It was not a gesture. It was twenty thousand mornings.

So instead I have noticed things about myself, and I want to list them, because it turns out she is all over me and I did not know.

I cannot leave a room without checking the plug sockets. I say “right, come on then” to myself before doing anything I do not want to do. I butter bread to the very edges, which my husband finds unnecessary and which is, in fact, correct.

When somebody tells me something upsetting I say nothing at all for a few seconds. I used to think that was a flaw. It is hers. She always waited before she answered you, and it meant that when the answer came you knew she had actually heard it.

And I do not say I love you very much, which I am aware is not ideal, and which I got directly from a woman who never said it to me once in twenty-five years.

She did not have to say it. She was fifty-eight and she started again.

Nanny, I am doing the plug sockets. I am buttering to the edges. It turns out you are just in there, doing all of it, all the time.

I loved you. Saying it now, and out loud, because you never would.