Friday
The first thing I ever wrote about my best friend was her eulogy. It had to be beautiful, obviously. I wasn’t just the best friend, I was the writer — beautiful was bare minimum. I wanted more. Demanded better. Imagined myself delivering some soaring evocation that would let us all pretend her back to life.
I admit: It wouldn’t be out of character if I had also, secretly, wanted to impress the crowd. If, sunk in the black depths and the resolution to never care about anything again, I cared about making an impression. Characters need flaws, I’m always reminding my students. Life and literature demand conflicting motives — you want flat clarity of emotion, watch a soap.
But it turns out grief is steamroller flat, monomaniac: I only wanted her back.
Her eulogy would be, should have been, a poetry of resurrection. Except that I hadn’t slept in three days and my brain function approximated a battery-powered doll, battery winding down. Pull the string and watch it cry. It was 3 a.m. Then it was 4. Then it was dawn. And finally, instead of a sorcerous invocation, I cribbed a writing exercise from eighth-grade English, spooled out a list of memories with the blunt inside-jokiness of yearbook ads and bad wedding toasts, as if anyone but me cared to hear about our goldfish poetry or Trivial Pursuit.
At least it fit the sprezzatura of the service, not a funeral technically — that would come later, muggy and formal in Fort Lauderdale, where she’d grown up. She’d started in Florida but ended in New York, with us, college friends still too young to know how to do death, and this was our DIY effort to mark it.
I think it was raining. I know I was wearing borrowed clothes, because I was only in the city for the summer and hadn’t thought to pack for a funeral. Crowded with people who hadn’t seen each other since graduation, the church had the feel of an ersatz reunion, how have you been, where are you working, what the fuck do we do now that we know we can die.
