In reality we're all standing upon the precipice of pain, it's just that most of us choose to ignore this fact.

That's a relatively good line. Certainly decent, compared to the stuff I normally have to sit through.
 

We disregard the inevitable, so we can apply full attention towards enduring our everyday nonsense. We discard the brute facts, just so we can get on with the shopping, the cleaning, the scrolling, the carefully tending to our jittery anxieties and desires.

You become numb to hearing the same old rubbish spoken every weekday. So, when something like this is uttered, I perk up in the pew.

But on occasions like today, we can no longer plead ignorance. The loss of those we love is inevitable. And this will end, for all of us as well. Death is destiny.

With a casual assuredness she readjusts the microphone so it sits closer to her lips. I'm warming to this woman in black, with her long red hair tied back in a severe ponytail.

This already stands out from the usual speeches.

These days, many speakers are merely content to regurgitate expressions ripped straight from the Internet.

I grew suspicious that this may be the case about a decade ago, around the time I began spotting recurrent phrases delivered from church altars across the city. The sentence construction was often identical, with only the name of the recently deceased altered. It did not take much online investigation to uncover dedicated sites and bulging sub-reddits providing plenty of pre-cooked elegiac lines.

It turns out the living are almost as lazy as the dead.

It's understandable, of course. Standing up there in front of everyone, if pressure makes the eulogist begin to fray, they are thankful to have the option of falling back upon the reassuring structure of memorised cliché.

Obviously, most people aren't experienced public speakers. They're upset. Some so distraught they find themselves gripped by paralysing silence, staring down at their tear-drenched piece of paper with its blurring text. They're only shaken free from this torpor by the supportive whispers from the front row - It's OK you're doing well - keep going.

But one thing all this most certainly isn't - is OK.

This woman speaking today seems to have a handle on some of these crucial details.

It's like we're all sworn members in this conspiracy of the living. You know what I mean?

This question is met by unwavering silence.

I battle the urge to stand up and shout, 'say it lady, I totally get what you mean', as if I'm bobbing up and down within a sweating, swaying Baptist congregation deep in the American South, rather than sitting between the dry suburban coughs and tepid blown noses of a subdued Dublin church.

It's a conspiracy sworn to secrecy. An omerta so stealthy you'd hardly know you're a member at all. This conspiracy remains solidly intact until that first late-night ring from your mobile jolts the smooth darkness. Or... eh...sorry, I'm so sorry.

A deep quiver in her voice, followed by a fulsome throat clearance. I hope she doesn't disintegrate; I’m really getting into this.

Or...a lump is felt in the shower. Or you look out your window and you see a marked car stopping outside your front gate. It's moments like that when the sun sets on the beforetimes you had once resided within, and you now realise things are never going to be the same again.

I've grown accustomed to the questioning glances from people wondering who I am. But at a funeral no one interrogates. The general body-language consists of quiet shuffling and sombre handshakes. Communication conducted through sighing, interspersed by sober head nodding. 

How did this all begin for me?

Well, I went through some really bad things 15 and a half years ago. It culminated in two of these in quick succession. I was left emptied. For some reason, that I still can't grasp, I found myself dropping into random ones in the weeks after that. Once I started, I remained hungry for what they provided.  To my surprise, attending haphazardly chosen funerals of strangers momentarily satiated me.

For 45 minutes or so, you brush skin against the outer contours of the invisible void. The ceremony yanks the chain that’s loosely wrapped around your wandering mind, refocusing it on the essential facts on the ground. Or underground perhaps.

It turned out, I love a good burial.

You could call this my weekday existential fix. The odd Saturday one as well, if I've a particular craving. An arbitrary funeral during lunchtime, is often the boost I require to keep going.

But regretfully, with most eulogies, you're served up such obvious, bland nonsense.

- She was the greatest mother.

- He was the happy go lucky type.

- His one true love was his dog Benji.

- Nothing was more important to him than his family.

Summing up an entire life in a few measly minutes. It's obscene when you really think about it. But here's the thing - every ritual we've built around death is purposely manufactured to alleviate us of this need to truly think about it.

The absolute last people funerals are for, is the dead. Funerals are about us- those remaining heart-beating suckers, still loitering around the departure lounge.

She slightly moves the microphone again.

Sometimes I think we're just waiting around to die.

Good God, this woman has real balls.

We're not so much gathered here today to say goodbye to my father. We're here to remember someone who has made a trip just a little before we all head on in the same direction.

Over the years I've generally found that the more elderly the deceased, the shorter the eulogy. If it's a dead child, people aren't able to string two sentences together. It's the middling corpse who generates most in the way of words per minute. That crucial 18-60 demographic dominates in death, just as in life.

Often the eulogist dusts off a few lines of Heaney for the first time since Leaving Cert. That Derek Mahon poem about how everything is going to be grand, that's popular now- although I think it jars at a funeral myself.

Sinatra's mawkish My Way trickles over the coffin of the life-long civil servant, or mourners shuffle away from a ceremony to the draining bars of You'll Never Walk Alone, as they collectively bite their tongues recalling the hateful narcissist who is currently being rolled into the back of the hearse.

The absolute lies we cleave to, even in the face of oblivion. The deceptive code we utilise until the bitter end.

He liked a few pints - Unremitting alcoholic.  

She was harmless - The permanently wilted wallflower has completed a life so epically unremarkable, that the painfully few people gathered by her graveside will barely notice she's gone.

He never missed a day's work in his life - An absolute sucker, who did things primarily to garner praise from others. But when these compliments failed to materialise, he was eaten up by resentment and grinding passive aggression. Actually, that's what probably finally did him in - this desperate unarticulated need to be recognised, eventually manifesting itself as a deadly physical illness.

He was a United fanatic - The scale of his blandness was neatly represented by his generic support for a generic club across the water.

She was a very private person - Oddball, who gripped tightly to a dark secret for most of her adult life, waking every morning with a clamping fear at its possible exposure. But despite the deceased obsessive furtiveness, all her mourners are well aware of the existence of the child she gave up during de Valera's second Presidential term. They've known for decades.

As I said, we're not actually here to say good-bye to my father. He's already gone. No point waving at this stage.

Jesus, this woman really gets it.

This is another reason I keep coming. Sometimes you catch the odd funeral where you're showered with insight. It's refreshing for the soul.

Last night when I was putting these few words together, I realised that almost everything I was going to talk about was connected to my father and his direct relationship with my siblings and I.

She's a lawyer probably, maybe a teacher. I'll do a little Google stalking later when I get back to work, after I shake the chief mourners’ hands and head on.

That was important for sure, but it was not the whole story. Not anything close to the whole story. 

Maybe I also come to these out of some sub-conscious solidarity with the expired. A bond I feel because when the day comes, my own 'event' will scarcely attract enough people to carry the box.

My father was a teenager once, a child as well, and there was his time with my mother before we were born. He was once a young man in love, with dreams of the future. He moved within great swaths of time and space that I've no access to. He was stupid, and drunk, and angry and sad, and lazy and fun and bright.  He lived so much life beyond the borders of my knowledge. These moments were as valid and significant to him as any I was there to witness or have come to know about second-hand.

Here we go, she's digging into the core. 

But by ignoring all that, by just talking about the father I had first-hand experience of- well it's like I'm colonising my father's memory. Do you understand me? It's like I'm occupying his legacy, and extracting what I need from it.

If I was going to be hypercritical, this feels like a turn away from the enduringly existential towards the narrowly political. Maybe she lectures in post-colonial and international law studies in Trinity or something?

No that's not it exactly...That conspiracy…You step back onto the precipice...sorry I'm mixing metaphors here.

Christ lady, you're a Nobel Laureate compared to most of the gibberish I've heard spoken over coffins. Keep going.

Yes, this conspiracy of the living. It's a club that we're all members of, but eventually we’ll all be expelled from. Its membership is weirdly increasing, but always dwindling. I'm not sure that shakes up the second law of thermodynamics or not? That's something dad would have had a strong opinion on.

Knowing laughter ripples across the congregation. I hate in-jokes at these things. They're inconsiderate to the neutral attendees like me.

So, the truth of it is, I've realised that I can't really talk about my father with any certainty or recall him with any legitimacy. Anything I'd say up here would be conditional. It'd be partial. Really, it would be a lie. I'm sorry.

She takes one step back from the microphone and looks down towards her feet.

I begin clapping.

The rest of the church is silent.

The woman raises her head. 

She squints and scans the church. She steps towards the microphone again and looks down the aisle, in my direction.

I stop clapping. 

She catches my eye, smiles and says – thank you for understanding.

I feel utterly alive.

David Lynch is an award winning journalist and author of three non-fiction books. These include a book of reportage from Palestine and Israel A Divided Paradise (New Island; 2009) and Confronting Shadows: An Introduction to the Poetry of Thomas Kinsella (New Island ; 2015). He recently had short fiction published in Crannog magazine and Swerve magazine. He received an Arts Council Agility Award in 2022 for his short story work. The Eulogy is a product of this work. He is currently working on his first novel.

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Of the story featured here, David says:

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‘Emptied by colossal grief, the narrator attends random funerals of strangers everyday, attempting to satiate a hunger for meaning and explanation.’