Nan was dead. Of that, no confirmation was needed – mouth hanging open in one final gasp; eyes short of a destination, ceasing to wander. I was 19 at the time, and in that moment, I kissed her cold forehead goodbye.
I’d loved my nan – well, great-nan – but this wasn’t her. This was a body, a retired vehicle of tea and toast production, and nobody quite knew what to say next. Being nearly a whole year into university – the first member of my family to ever go – ‘what to say next’ fell to me. ‘You’re good with words, Alex,’ one relative chided, in the same tone you’d use to goad someone into fixing your kitchen cabinet. I was assigned the eulogy.
A eulogy is essentially just a polite rewrite of someone’s life, with their missteps, prejudices and prior convictions rebranded as pops of colour in their once-effervescent personalities. Bad habits become calling cards – ‘God, she loved a scotch and soda!’ – and ribald tales from work, home and holiday displace the humdrum rhythms of ordinary life when tallying one’s cosmic lot.
My nan wasn’t the kind of person who left a trail of anecdotes in her wake. She hadn’t really left much body in her wake, either. Physically, she was a tiny lady. Wrapped in her beige shawl and cradled by timber, she looked, I thought on my way up to the altar, like Yoda.
I worked with what I had. ‘Despite being half-blind, her eyes twinkled,’ I started. ‘She had no teeth, yet her smile lit up rooms, and though her voice rattled with the endless cigarettes that had diffused into the wallpaper, she had a contagious laugh.’
I felt I’d done her proud, tucking my piece of paper back into the breast pocket of my grey Next suit before slotting back into the pews beside my bleary-eyed dad. Despite really trying to give it some vigour in the final lines, it was hard to read the room to get a measure of my performance as I looked out onto a sea of pale grimaces and clenched jaws, occasionally punctuated by the odd sniffle from a snotty-nosed distant relative. It was only at the burial that I was told how much I had – and there is no better term for this – smashed it.
By the graveside, the vicar put her arm around me and congratulated me on what I’d written. ‘It’s deeply impressive. Perfect, even,’ she told me. This was not to be my last interaction with the vicar, who to this day I recall in my mind’s eye as not just looking like, but being Dawn French (editor’s note: Ms French has no formal ordained role with the Church of England). Mourners ebbed away from the graveside as rain began rap-tapping the coffin lid, right on cue. I looked ahead and saw the Edwardian schoolhouse my nan had attended in the 1920s. Ultimately, she’d only really moved 100 feet in her life.
At the wake everyone was awkward and, would you believe it, morose. A bald cousin with an avocado torso flicked through the rows of finger sandwiches as if searching through a filing cabinet. As he did so, he told me a story about getting hit in the head with a golf ball. He was interrupted as another older relative tapped me on the shoulder.
