Bad Eulogies

The following is a university essay which was meant to be assessing two texts in reference to the idea of list-making, whether the impulse to make one gestures to something quite fundamental in human nature. One text was bad history, and the other was the death-bed speech of a Shakespearean king. Lacking in time and wherewithal, I did something quite out of character and decided to write something personal instead – with abjection, you tend to be able to get away with being light on the quotes.

In dialogue with the ‘crumbling into darkness’ element of Spears Brooker’s comment on the list-making impulse, is the inescapable phenomenon of one’s remembrance being executed poorly. I would argue that, while at best underwhelming, and at worst funny, the bad eulogy shares with the process of making lists that furious attempt to ‘snatch our best’ from the onset of the inevitable small service and doily-topped bathos that is the family funeral at one’s local parish church. (Particularly if you live in Essex, as some people ultimately must.) I would also argue that, like the truly useful list, it is almost impossible to execute remembrance well, because the poetic or ceremonial articulation of grief is in my experience either the failure to remember a person entirely, or the failure to communicate the sense that that person was ever actually alive.

Spears Brooker’s defence seems to be based on saving it from the criticism that it is necessary trivial, but the implication is that ultimately, they mostly do fail: I see in the list the implication of reduction to arbitrary consecutiveness. More broadly, the process of writing a list is mostly a misuse of time that could be spent doing the things on the list: I have never succeeded at completing every task on a list in the near two decades in which I have been alive. I also think that grief inspires writers to list in a way that is related, but not the same as the impulse to compose a blazon: it is much more reconciled to failure, and similarly concerned with the triviality of its form with contrast to that which it details. After all, while it is complimentary to misrepresent the traits of a loved one that is still living, there is something skin-crawlingly disingenuous about deifying a loved one that is now dead.

When I was twelve I was preparing to attend the funeral of a family member of whom I was more than moderately fond, whom I will call Peter, and found two things out, to my dismay. This first was that the poem that was going to be read out was appallingly bad, and the second was that I had no idea how to begin writing my own improvement upon it. [2]The poem, called He Is Gone, begins:

‘You can shed tears that he is gone

Or you can smile because he has lived

 You can close your eyes and pray that he will come back

Or you can open your eyes and see all that he has left

 Your heart can be empty because you can’t see him

Or you can be full of the love that you shared…’

I have never met David Hawkins (based in Cumbria), but I can say with total certainty that I despise him. This poem goes on to assert that the reader should do ‘what he would want’, and move on. This is the most offensive aspect of the piece. The central issue with this list, other than the fact its appalling, is that it makes an itinerary out of the process of grief while completely abstracting itself from any sense that a person ever inspired it. [3] This is the first form of list that grief seems to inspire interest in: the totally generic. These lists storify the psychological process of the grieving in a way that mostly acknowledges themselves as heedless of the dead themselves. They do not simply cheat time, they interact only tangentially with it, figuring death as a transformative event from which nothing can be retrieved. The perspective of grief-stricken subsumes, strangles and swallows that of daughter, brother, friend. This reminds me of the irony with which Auden’s “Funeral Blues” was so repurposed from a satirical elegy about the posthumous deification of the politician, to a heartfelt eulogy delivered in teary, snagging Scottish tones to Simon Callow’s casket  in Four Weddings and a Funeral. ‘He was my North, my south, my East, my West / My working week and my Sunday rest, / My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,/ I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.’ Such lists are moving because they are so temporally irreverent, seeking not to figure a systematic cohesion of the life or thoughts or personality of the dead, or even pick out the Greatest Hits, as I will detail later, but are more a sort of primal yell. They proliferate, and pay homage only to their own constructions, like lists people write to feel productive.

The other kind is the kind of list I encountered in the mouth of the priest who attended the service, who clearly was aware of The Life and Times of the person who I’d lost, but only in the passing sense of an underutilised journalist who’s googled a minor celebrity of waning popularity for an obituary in The Scotsman. Even the specific list, I find, makes the recent dead into the essentially dead: the elegy, as a form, is awfully presumptuous, and turns the end of a life into a selection of shiny narrative items. While this was upsettingly underwhelming to hear as a child, I can now at least appreciate its broad faithfulness to the general process of speaking or writing about grief of which I suspect people to be generally capable. When I was speaking to Peter near the end of his life, I found myself trying desperately to list things we had done together, and only really managing to conjure around three events of low hilarity and only middling fondness for the both of us, because they were quick to tell and required little explanation that I didn’t have time for. They were also entirely things that made sense to my ill-formed child’s brain, and, to make reference again to Spears Brooker’s remark, I’m not sure when I embarked upon it I had any real belief that Peter could even hear me. I think it is a human impulse to convert memories into a glittering currency in the wake of sudden and imminent catastrophe, and it is perhaps this that Strachey tries to imitate. I am certain, though, that this is more the penchant of the dying-adjacent than the actually dying, and for the most part I consider this biography to suffer from that annoyingly spurious psychological fictitiousness that these sorts of historical texts can in order to engage their reader. Indeed, textual grief invites a third member to a two, and if we are honest, mostly one, person dialogue that death inspires in those close to the action. This thought makes me question what kind of anecdotes I would have listed if I had been alone with Peter.

When Strachey lists memories like ‘Lord Palmerston’s queer clothes and high demeanour’ I am however reminded of the, I think, quite admirable attempt to figure these things in terms of the funny, or at least interesting. It is a strange, personless performance. Writing about the dying, or even it seems, speaking to them with a third-party present, encourages one to aestheticize and itemise someone’s whole life. The aspect of the biography I find most convincing as an analogue to the kind of listing that grief makes most unavoidable, is the focus one has on items, ‘her mother’s feathers’, ‘a great old-repeater watch of her father’s in its tortoise-shell case’. Naturally this is to deploy some material history and create a more evocative sense of her childhood, but nonetheless it does speak to the listing I understand well. Grief of this kind is domestic, and so imbues objects with a kind of useless potency – for this reason, Margaret Atwood’s ‘Morning in the Burned House’ is one of my favourite treatments of the subject of the dead. It is honest about grief’s self-defensive, magpie quality, and acknowledges the sooty stains of afterness that death tarnishes things with. Listing of this kind, then, feels trivial, but really, really isn’t. Lists acknowledge the spaces between things where meaning growls untapped.

The less depressing conclusion this begs is that grief is fundamentally forgetful, and so it does one well to list. All eulogies are bad eulogies, and all elegiac poems and speeches are insufficient: part of reconciling oneself with the reality of losing someone one loves is a reconciliation to the arbitrary consecutiveness of the either ineffective or self-torturing memory. It is a project of noting things down as one has it, because mourning is self-obsessed and reactive, and so defies chronology. Trying to inhabit the actual mind of the dead, even if you loved them very much, is not to be attempted. There is a grim necessity to appropriating the dead for the purposes of the living: the best we can hope is not to refer to them with lines such as ‘perhaps, in the secret chambers of consciousness, she had her thoughts, too.’ All Eulogies are controlled failures, but the best one can expect in the process of clumsily gesticulating towards the recent dead is to not say anything too embarrassing.

[2] To be fair, I was twelve.

[3] I acknowledge how intellectually insincere of me it is to frame this argument specifically about elegising loved ones through two extracts about dead royalty. Perhaps there’s a point here about the abstraction of the grief poem, that I can still make these relevant. Or perhaps I don’t.