Personal Narrative: My First Eulogy

I gave my first Eulogy before I knew the meaning of the word. The church was decorated for Christmas. Wreaths hung at the door carrying a scent of evergreen and deep red poinsettias bloomed on the steps up to the altar. But the music didn’t match the decorations. Instead of “Hark the Herald” and “Silent Night” the church echoed with somber hymns about meeting jesus at the end of our lives rather than the beginning of his. Rows of wooden pews were filled with mourners in various shapes, sizes and ages and in varying states of emotional well-being. I fiddled with the program, looking for names I could recognize and ones that I could not. And then I found mine, under “Tributes and Testimony”, “Kaitlin Manning - Niece.” And I thought of the title niece and then whom it referred to and my heart skipped a beat, an experience I had become familiar with over the past couple of days, as the words connected pathways in my mind against my will. I had found that that’s the way it works with these kind of things. Your life becomes a maze of connections which all …show more content…
He wasn’t. I had never seen my Dad cry. I left then, because the people I usually turned to for answers didn’t have any to offer. Instead I found a pile of scratch paper in my Dad’s office, the nicest pen I could rummage for and a quiet corner tucked behind the piano. Holding the copy I could see the seemingly innocuous smudges left by my tear stained fingers as I had scrawled out the only thing I could think of as I sat, tucked away in the music room. I hadn’t known what to do. Grown-ups liked to tell me how to prepare for 4th grade, or learn to be a big sister, or try out a new soccer move. No one had told me what to do for a situation like this. So, with my heart leaking from my eyes and a lump boiling up in my throat, I wrote. For my family, I wrote a reminder of what she had meant to us all. For myself, I wrote an account of what I would miss. And finally, for the Aunt I had lost, I wrote a