Eulogy
Danielle Jacobson
“At the temple there is a poem called “Loss” carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.”
-Chiyo (Memoirs of a Geisha)
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Funerals all generally run the same way. First someone dies. This is the one thing that never changes. When someone you care about dies an emptiness washes over you. They call this grief, but that’s just a dressed up term for feeling really crummy. You’re really just feeling loss. Everything about funerals is meant to make the loss easier. The family and close friends get together and plan how people are supposed to say goodbye. They get a bunch of people to put on panty hose and gather in a church that’s always either too hot or too cold. Then they have a church service, basically. The only thing that’s different is that someone gets to lay down the whole time – the one person who can’t help it. There are usually some hymns and a message. Then there’s the eulogy. Someone from the family stands up and starts to cry as they read from a piece of paper memory after memory of the person they’ve lost. They remember all the good things. After they’re done everyone knows why their existence mattered, why they were important, why they were irreplaceable.
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“It’s just a building.” My dad was like a broken record. I swear he’d said that a hundred times since they sold the house. He was bored without a job and he wanted company and he needed help packing up the house. I don’t have classes on Tuesdays, so I’d gone over to have lunch with him and ended up staying all afternoon filling boxes. I finally checked the time around 5:00 and realized I was late for a meeting. I walked downstairs to the basement to drop off the box I’d just taped up. I plopped the box on the top of a stack of bigger boxes and looked around. There were boxes everywhere. Upstairs I could hear my dad taping up more boxes for the next load to the basement. So many boxes…
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I grew up in a beautiful house, the dream house my dad built for my mom. I only really lived in that house for four years. I say “grew up” because I changed more in those four years than I did all through adolescence. The reality is that I grew up in a funeral home. My Girl was a lot less funny to me growing up. My dad was a funeral director and my family lived in the tiny apartment on the second story of the funeral home he worked in. Most little girls knew the names of all the Barbie Dolls and princess movies. I was well versed on funeral terminology. Most girls don’t know what a visitation is or what you do with an urn. Most little girls have never even heard a eulogy, but I did.
The apartment had five rooms: two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room. We moved in on the first day of February when I was in first grade. I remember there being boxes everywhere. I was so naïve at that point that I didn’t really care that we were leaving behind a much bigger house, one where I had my own room. I was still at the age that thinks sharing a room means the monsters under the bed can’t touch you.
I didn’t really like the town we were moving from, so that made it easier. I remember that it had a roller skating rink that looked like a castle and that the Pizza Hut was built on planks overlooking the lake the town was built around. I had terrible ear infections while we were living there. The medicine I would take to numb the pain would give me really weird dreams, whether or not I was actually sleeping. To this day there is about a six-month period where I have no idea what was reality and what were drug-induced hallucinations. I was convinced that there was a monster in the attic that looked like the big mouse from Chucky Cheese’s. When my parents told me we were leaving I was glad to leave the attic monster behind.
When we moved into the funeral home all the floors in the apartment were carpeted, including the kitchen and bathroom. The whole apartment was covered with brown shag carpet except for my sister’s and my room; the shag carpet in our room was bright red.
Most of the apartment had dark wood paneling on the walls. The living room was the biggest room, but that was only after my parents had remodeled it. At first it was part living area, part sun room. When they decided to change it they took out the windows in the sun room and put quality insulation in the walls. They tore up the shag carpet and the brown paneling and put in a neutral white carpet with striped wall paper. They bought new furniture that wouldn’t have matched the brown paneling. The kitchen was next. They ripped up the carpet in there too and put down black and white checkered linoleum. They painted everything white, including the cabinets. The rest of the apartment followed. By the time they’d finished, everything looked neutral. The only splash of character was in my room. They’d painted it white, too, but they put up a rainbow ceiling fan that matched the multi-colored Mickey Mouse border to make it a little less boring. I never liked that room. There was nothing about it that resembled me. I don’t have the memories in that apartment that I have in the house. My room in the funeral home was just a room with white walls with colorful accents to cover it up.
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Even with the boxes, you could still see the walls my dad painted last fall. The basement wasn’t finished until this year. My parents found out that the garden club wanted to decorate the house for their Christmas tour. The idea of 3,000 people traipsing through her house made my mom a little psycho while it turned my dad into Handy Andy. Within a week all the walls were painted and he’d already looked into ordering cabinets for the kitchen downstairs.
The bathroom in the basement was one of the first things to get finished off. I peeked into the bathroom as I walked by. In high school my friends and I would have movie nights where we’d spend half the night watching Nicholas Cage on the big screen in the home theater. The other half of the night we’d turn off all the lights and play hide and seek in the pitch black. This was particularly fun when we had the guys over.
My friends were over watching a movie on Halloween my senior year. My semi-quasi-on-and-off boyfriend, Sam, and I spent the better portion of The Count of Monte Cristo trying to hide the fact that we were on-again from our friends. When the movie was over someone suggested hide and seek, and the lights were off in an instant. Everyone scattered. I wandered my way into the bathroom and found that Sam had hidden in there as well. I bumped into him before realizing he was standing right inside the door. I still remember the way the room smelled that night, it was a strange mix of his cologne and dry wall covered in fresh primer. I remember the smell of that bathroom better than I can remember anything about the kiss itself. Even standing in there now, over two years later, I could almost smell the primer. Sam and I spent the better part of the next six months kissing just about everywhere we went together, but the bathroom was special. That first kiss was the only one before he started cheating on me. Even though the bathroom was finished now, complete with red walls and a lodge themed décor, there was something incomplete about it. Something had been lost, both in that room and in Sam and my relationship after that night, something that was irreplaceable. I was going to miss that bathroom.
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We lived in that tiny apartment for almost nine years. In that time there were no sleepovers, no birthday parties, no movie nights. We survived my sister’s high school years with limited injury and little hot water. I survived elementary and middle school without ever inviting friends over. When my sister left for college my freshman year I was sad to see her go until I realized the possibilities that having my own room opened up. There were still no sleepovers or parties, but I had complete and total dominion over the remote control. I still have that remote control, and the television that goes with it for that matter. It doesn’t work right anymore. It’s huge and it’s too old to hook up directly to a DVD player. You have to smack the right side of it once you turn it on if you want to see the picture along with the audio, and there’s a white stripe at the top of the screen. There’s no room in the town house for a TV that big. I had to post an ad on the campus website. It’s not even worth $25 any more. There’s something so sad about selling that TV. It’s like selling off a memory. To most people TVs don’t really matter. They’re not important. But to me it represented so much more. It wasn’t just that I sold the TV; it was why I had to sell it. We weren’t just losing the house; we had to find places to store everything in it. It’s impossible to store that much memory. You have to let go of some of it, pick and choose which memories are important. Everything else is lost.
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The first time I spent the night in my room at the house after leaving for college was over Christmas Break. As I looked around at my room and all the boxes, I remembered coming home that first semester. My parents had both been at work, so I’d unloaded the car all by myself. It took me about an hour. Being a freshman I had no concept of light packing. I got up to my room with the last load and I looked around. The walls were still green, pickle green to be exact. The funny thing was that pickle green doesn’t look anything like the dark color of pickles. It’s more of a lighter, summery color. It’s the type of color you expect to find on umbrellas in Miami Beach, not in a college student’s bedroom. More importantly, it was the shade of green that was on all my high school t-shirts and uniforms, including my skimpy little cheerleading skirt. All my high school posters (also green), pictures and awards were still on the wall. My bed was still bunked. Everywhere I looked I was reading a memory of high school. For every picture of me smiling with my friends there were ten more memories of fights and arguments and teenage drama. It was like the walls were shouting at me.
I noticed a picture hanging above my dresser, the only one in black and white. It had been taken at the end of my junior year of high school during the last game of the Iowa State Girls’ Basketball Tournament. In the frame you can easily see four girls: my three closest friends and me. We’re all wearing the matching t-shirts we’d made together a week prior. It had become a tradition to get together in my basement and decorate shirts with puff paint and cute sayings for all the tournament games. That particular year our shirts were black with the words “Pella, viewed to be the best” painted across the front.
By the time I graduated high school drama, boys, and fighting had ruined our photographic bliss. Looking at the picture, I realized that a year after it was taken we were no longer on speaking terms. Our basketball team didn’t make it to state that year, and there were no pictures taken of the four of us in matching clothes. Instead, I walked across the stage at graduation with relief because I knew I wouldn’t have to see them again. When I left for college a few months after that I decided to leave the matching t-shirt days behind along with the rest of my senior year, but coming home to a green room with postered walls made that seem impossible. I tore the picture down and threw it in the trash. I was sick of remembering high school.
Before my parents got home that day, I’d taken everything else off the walls, debunked my bed, rearranged the furniture, and put every high school memory in a box in the corner of our attic. The only things left from high school were the green walls, but not for long. When my dad walked in that night I was looking at paint samples.
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The night my sister left I stayed up taking everything off the walls that belonged to her. I wanted to rearrange the room, but it was too small and the bed would only fit in so many places without blocking a doorway. I put my own posters and covered the walls with birthday cards and old Mylar balloons, anything to cover up the white walls. When I finished, I decided to dust and vacuum just to get rid of any remnant of my departed roommate. Afterwards, I sprayed some cheap Wal-Mart perfume around so it wouldn’t even smell like my sister. Finally content, I sat down on my sister’s bed and looked around. And I cried. She wasn’t there. Her clothes were gone, her shoes were gone, and now all her posters were gone. She had left, and thanks to me there were no memories of her. It was just a room with white walls, no matter how many posters or borders I put up.
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I looked around my room. There were no high school memories. Nothing in it resembled Miami Beach. My dad and I repainted it over break that year. It was now a dark teal, turquoise color. There were no memories on the walls; those had been replaced with black and white pictures of the New York City sky line, which were now in a row against the wall. Even my bed looked different with its white down comforter and contemporary throw pillows folded neatly on the floor beside the empty frame. In the place of the memories of high school I should have seen memories of college. Instead all I saw were blank walls and taped-up boxes.
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My parents took my sister and I out for dinner about six months after the post-college purging of my room and announced that they had bought a lot, and plans, and they’d hired a construction company. My dad was finally building my mom her dream house. My parents were ready to comfort my sister and me about moving out of the tiny apartment. They were all prepped with quick answers and positive things about the new house. That was not necessary. My sister and I were so excited that we couldn’t think of anything bad about moving. It was just an apartment. It had never really been more than that. It was just a bunch of rooms with white walls and neutral, inoffensive carpet. My sister didn’t feel like we were losing anything.
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My sister and I had been trying to think up good things about moving. The only one I could think of was that I hated the bathroom tile. My sister and I had argued over the color of our shared bathroom for the better part of three months before my mother made the decision for us and told us to go pick out tile to match. The unfortunate thing was that there are not a whole lot of options to match bright orange walls. We landed on a heinous gray tile that didn’t match the peach color we finally convinced our mom to let us paint over her “kumquat” walls. My sister and I vowed that there would be no orange walls in the new town house.
My dad came up to check on me and saw me staring at the bathroom. He had that look on his face that parents get when they think their kid’s about to blow up a building or start fire to their high school. I wasn’t crazy, I was just sad. It’s just a building, I though to myself as I grabbed my keys and headed downstairs. I walked out to my car and looked back at my house, the house my dad built. I started to cry. It had been just an apartment. It had been just a room with white walls. My house may have been just a building, but it was never just a basement, or a bathroom, or tile. They were physical representations of a larger dream, literal metaphors. They were memories with walls. I noticed the “Sold” sign was covered in an inch or two of snow. You can read loss.