Eulogy For Father

Decent Essays

Pop said, “Your father wrote extremely well,” but it sounds like “Experience is the best teacher.” I think “He wrote with his feet. Like that guy that plays the piano, who was in the newspaper.” I want to say, “He wrote with his eyeballs.’ I want to asininely say “If it’s extremely well we’re talking about, I am extremely well.” I had a cold from the day of the funeral. Three says coming, three days here, three days going, according to my grandmother’s sister, ever at home with her, my tall, subdued (but able to speak faster than my mother could feel) great-aunt Edna, then, when she sat there on the sofa, and as her long-widowed wit and humility distract me, more truth distracts: “namely” that my father would have said “exceedingly well.” My mother by propagating that letter a month or so after his death fixed it as his letter. She did it jointly with his family, whatever she thought. His words were allowed to do it. Is the letter a belonging I am to reclaim? If words can’t belong to us, my father’s attention can. The letter was attention to me. Like a walk along the docks. A talk. “To me, to me.” I did not think it easily, in the sense of precisely. But long …show more content…

Do I not know what’s going on? How crushed Pop is at the viewing and almost kin to me. To his body before me in its suit I actually yield some of my unemployed spirit. I understand that he once shipped out to South America, and later, a young man from Maine, he married a beautiful Georgia widow in Brooklyn and took on her two young sons. I want to get away, yet this is the last time I can see my father’s face. Someone said something in the warm room that got lost, but someone then said, “He’s with Him.” I am not horrified by the face-- his head’s hair on the pillow. And his ears. There’s a decodable tincture of banana smell I’ve picked up before in this building. It stays with me as if someone has told me it is so. Someone said, “He was too young,” and I heard, “He died too

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Eulogy For Father