I was called to the pulpit after Grandpa slipped on the porch and died a week later. Someone had to say something, and seeing as I’d spoken at Grandma’s service years ago, and at some services on my wife’s side of the family, it wasn’t that big of a surprise. When Uncle Jack rang, I closed my eyes before answering the phone and thought about whether I could break down and sob over the phone, make it so he couldn’t ask me in the slowest, softest human voice if I wouldn’t consider saying a few words for my Grandpa at the service.

I’m not an actor, just an amateur eulogist. I think people must know I’m immune to the unpredictable waves of grief that befall normal people at funerals. I’m a stone who can speak, and everyone knows it and they’re secretly jealous. They love how I speak after death, with detachment and grace. Each one is more dreadful than the last, of course. My grandpa’s eulogy turned out as stale as his last meal, an unfinished platter of food disguised with salt. The foolish reckonings and good things to be said, beautiful things that make good people cry, the widows and children of the dead, the thank-yous and gentle touches.

The two eulogies before this one (both on my wife’s side), have read like pieces of propaganda doled out by an optimistic unitary state, both oppressive and comforting. Someone who has fooled their constituents into believing in unity. When I’m on a roll, there is nothing more undeniable: I don’t have a clue what I’m saying except that it’s what someone important to the family wants to hear. You take on the persona of that persona. Nobody remembers a eulogy so much as they remember the feelings it gave them. Maybe I’m a safety net, maybe a spinner. I leave stuff out, the domestic violence, the military fathers, the lost fathers, the addictions and anger. My words only last until they are spoken, then it’s over.

            Otherwise I’m just a thirty-one-year-old man who works IT at the downtown library. The call to religion or the church never occurred to me, although it’s been suggested by the priests and grandmothers who have listened close enough to approach me after the burial with a word. At best, I’m one-third priest.       

At the most recent funeral, when my daughter caught some of what I said to my wife about the loneliness of the job and my newfound pessimism regarding its function (it’s always been about me), my daughter turned to me quickly and said, you don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, Dad, at which point I gave her a look that said, where the fuck did you steal that from? Then I told her I was going to use it in the eulogy—I needed something to end on—and I did, shamefully.

My first eulogy was just a story I told at my grandmother’s funeral, but everyone praised it to the heavens. One time my aunt asked me to say something at the funeral of her friend, someone I’d met just once but who has no doubt heard all about me. A son can’t say no. Actually—

            It probably started after two of my classmates from high school died within a year of each other when I was twenty, an overdose and a suicide. I went to a small high school, and the two events left our generation of the town marked. In what would be my first eulogy, I wrote a letter to Austin, the one who’d overdosed, and posted it on my Blogger on the Internet of 2010. It was the most personal thing I’d ever written for a public audience, and it meant a lot to me the day it was done and I found the nerve to post it. It surprised me what I remembered, and how. The letter hinged on a detail about how the first house Austin was able to stay at overnight was mine, on account of his bedwetting problem at home. The memory broke me when I remembered it, so I made it about me and posted it.

            After my classmates and those close to Austin in the community praised me for it, I developed conflicting feelings. I had trouble unseeing a connection I’d made but couldn’t publish: I couldn’t stop thinking of the kind of mess Austin may have left behind on the bed or the carpet or the bathroom, wherever he was when he overdosed. Connect this with his bedwetting as a child and it’s almost undeniable: there was a cult of waste going on, uniting Americans in their intrusive patterns, their sicknesses and terrible desires. Even in waste, there are connections to be made.         

        Austin was victim to a system of terrible desires, hooked on the urge to expel without the choice of holding it back, hooked on an injection of the future with the needle of the now. After these tragedies, I ghosted the town and my friends and moved three hours away from it for college. I only come home for Christmas and death.