Best Eulogies by Sofia Lavidalie

Best Eulogies

by Sofia Lavidalie

When I was in middle school, near the end of my sixth-grade year, a boy who lived down my street was murdered. His mother got a restraining order against his father in early April, and a week later, his father broke into their house and shot both of them. Mom told me in the early morning while I got ready for school. She said, “Ron’s dead; watch your brother.”

There wasn’t much to do, but I listened to her. I sat on the floor by my brother’s crib while Mom smoked and talked on the phone with her friend who lived in our subdivision. A lot of her friends at the time were my own friends’ mothers, so the story of Ron’s death passed mom-to-mom down Lakeway Cove like a game of telephone. My mom heard it from Morgan’s mom, Morgan’s mom heard it from Hunter’s mom, so on and so forth.

I didn’t have my own phone yet, so I sat in silence with the news, thinking about the fact that nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I’d been grounded in a childish belief that nothing truly bad could happen to anyone I knew. My abuelita had been diagnosed with cancer, but she was outliving her prognosis. My mother suffered a difficult miscarriage, but she ended up having my brother. When bad things happened, they were at a distance, and if they weren’t, they were at least survivable.

I have to believe this mindset was a result of my upbringing—spoiled, cushy, sheltered from our poorness until we were no longer poor. I spent a large chunk of my childhood growing up in a nice suburb, the one in which Ron died. It was yellowed and dull like a bag of old oranges, with houses that were nearly identical but still aesthetically inconsistent. I could only assume the homeowner’s association was staffed exclusively by dystopian novel antagonists and Republicans dead set on squashing out any individuality or artistic expression. In my moodier teenage years, I’d often remark to my parents that “Gonzales is the kind of place people go to die in.” In all fairness to my young self, I guess I wasn’t wrong.

I carry some shame now about the way I grew up. I recognize my privilege for what it is, and it disgusts me to think about how much time I spent assuming the life I lived was something owed to me. I find this sort of self-flagellation uninteresting, though. I’m not sure whether my hate for the suburbs is more about the privilege they represent or about specifically hating the suburb in which I grew up.

Among my peer group of young liberals, suburbs are a sort of caricature of everything we despise—they’re white, they’re heterosexual, they’re upper-middle class. Occasionally my boyfriend will bring up the topic of moving to the suburbs after we graduate, and it always astounds me that he sees that as an option. Move to the suburbs? How could I—with my English degree, and my stack of Andrea Dworkin books, and my hair—move to the suburbs? There is an unspoken pact between my peers and me that we will not end up like our parents. It feels very obvious to us that we are definitely the first-ever generation to have made this pact.

Despite our best efforts, though, I think most of us will end up happy. For most of my childhood in the suburbs, I was happy. Then Ron was murdered, and for a while, everything felt shattered. I don’t know why I cling to this period more than I do all the positive memories of the subdivision. Maybe it’s self-serving. When people ask me about my childhood, sometimes “I grew up in a suburb where a kid died” is easier than “I grew up in a suburb.”

The front door of Ron’s house was made partially of glass, and when his dad broke in to kill him, he left it shattered on the doormat. A few hours after the murder, a local news station released an image of the door’s remains, and next to the pile of glass sat Ron’s shoes. I find this kind of journalism unbecoming and unnecessary, but I return to the image of the shoes often. A pair of small, limp tennis shoes flecked with glimmering shards of glass, a sort of still-life portrait of a crime scene.

The glass stayed there, other neighborhood kids pointed out to me, for a week after the murder. Memorial items littered the driveway, creating a blur of green stems and white flowers. This pile remained long after the memorial, and it became a kind of fixture in my view of the neighborhood. I’d gaze at it passively through my dad’s car window the way I gazed at flowerbeds or Christmas decorations.

I often speculated with Morgan about when they’d get rid of the pile. “It’s like a gravestone,” she told me, and it always felt that way to us. We started avoiding that part of the neighborhood when we rode our scooters. Even when Ron and his mom were long dead, it felt like they were still in the house somehow, unfound, buried in the tile. The flowers are long gone now. I can’t remember them disappearing.

The night after he died, Ron’s family held a memorial for him and his mom down our street. All the kids I knew came with their parents, wearing school uniforms and holding fake candles in little paper cups. It was dark outside, and the orange streetlights made the tears on our faces shine yellow. I kept a mental note of who was crying and who wasn’t. The boys in our neighborhood were prone to fighting, and I knew that a few of the boys at the memorial had fought with Ron before. Some of them were crying. I felt a sort of self-righteous anger at them; I had never fought with Ron. The few times I’d talked to him, we’d gotten along very well. I felt this gave me a sort of right to be sad that the boys didn’t have, even though, looking back now, they had much more to be sad about than I did.

I think I was trying to pin my guilt about not being very close with Ron onto someone else. Going to these grief-centric events is always very awkward when you’re not quite grieving.

The first time I ever really grieved was when my abuelita passed away. I was fifteen when we had her late-summer funeral. I thought my sadness would numb

me to the inherent awkwardness of the event, but it didn’t. Funerals are very self-important. My abuelita was not a self-important woman. Before her death, she orchestrated her funeral to reflect that as much as possible—we had to sing, we weren’t allowed to wear all black, we weren’t even allowed to call it a funeral (it was a “celebration of life,” my mom likes to say). But there is no way to cry in public that doesn’t feel like performance art.

I gave her eulogy, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do but felt obligated to anyway. It was a very calculated process for me. I pored over quotes about life on Goodreads and wracked my brain and Facebook page for memories. I googled “best eulogies.” I reread it over and over again in the mirror so I wouldn’t cry. Though I am prone to them, I’ve always hated public displays of emotion, especially when they involved my family. It seemed obvious to me that crying at my abuelita’s funeral would be unbecoming. This logic didn’t amount to much, though. I was reduced to tears almost as soon as I stepped in front of the mic.

Grief, when we’re in it, makes children out of all of us. I think part of what makes it so humiliating is that no matter how big the loss, no matter how great the pain, there will always be people around you who could not care less. Funerals make this distinction uncomfortably clear.

I remember seeing a woman at Ron’s vigil. She was a large older woman with dark skin, and she was unfamiliar to me, so I knew she was a relative, not a neighbor. As more people showed up and the memorial rose into a crescendo, her large body moved with loud, wracking sobs. I had never witnessed grief like that before. I’d never seen anyone cry so loudly like the Earth was about to split open beneath them. All the while I’d been so focused on my performance of grief, true grief—shattering, earth-bending, unbelievable, permanent grief— swelled right in front of me.

I wanted to leave. I was uncomfortable and afraid. The scope of this woman’s loss humiliated me and my stupid conviction that I was somehow shielded from death. Death always seemed to be on my periphery, but now it was in my suburb, my clean, dull suburb, leaving a permanent stain on all my yellowed memories. It was haunting all of our houses. The woman’s crying sent a clear message: someday, something will happen that makes me cry like that.

I call my mom to tell her about this essay. She’s with my aunt, who also came to the memorial, so they put the phone on speaker while I read off an excerpt to them. They fill in some of the details for me.

They bring up the woman crying before I even mention her. When we talk about the memorial, it’s the first thing to come to both of their minds. “It was shocking,” my aunt says.

They tell me that the woman who’d been crying at Ron’s memorial was his grandmother. Ron’s mother was her only daughter. She’d begun crying after

their family started to sing “Amazing Grace,” and the crowd of memorial-goers began to sing along. I have vague memories of this—not of the family singing, but of myself following in my small voice, feeling embarrassed and warm under the orange lights.

Mom tells me about how Ron’s grandmother rocked back and forth and moaned under the chorus of voices. I read them the paragraph I wrote about her, and my mother and aunt hum approvingly.

I circle back to the beginning of the essay—waking up, the blue light of morning, my mom breaking the news to me. “Ron’s dead.”

“I never said that.”

What?

“I didn’t just say, ‘Ron’s dead,’ I sat you down and told you what I knew, that he and his mom were shot. I didn’t just say it bluntly like that.”

Whenever I was bored as a child, I would imagine my life as a novel being perpetually written. I’d be sitting around my house, cleaning my room, or doing my homework, and in my head, I’d write the story. “She looked down at her book; she put her pencil to the paper; she filled in a bubble.” This practice has carried on into my adult life. Even when I don’t do it consciously, I’m always mining my sorrows for plot points.

Andrea Dworkin says that to write means to cannibalize oneself. I’ve often found my life too boring to cannibalize, but that hasn’t stopped me.

That’s why, I think, being a writer has robbed me of my memory. My mom’s account of the morning makes much more sense than mine—she is not a very blunt or unfeeling person, she would have no reason to break the news in such a thoughtless way—but it is my own recollection that sticks with me most. When I think back to that morning, it is the memory of my mom’s bluntness that is most vivid. It probably didn’t happen.

People often say that words are just an unfaithful translation of life. I’d say the same is true for memory. As much as I want to be faithful to my past, to the younger version of myself that yells out every time I write about her, I know that I am not. I can’t be. Consciously or unconsciously, I always choose the version of the past where I look best: where I have brushed teeth, and my hair is shiny, and I care about everyone.

I have one memory of Ron. I am with my cousin, and we are in someone’s backyard. There’s a group of us there, us yellow-neighborhood, suburbanite children, and we’re on a trampoline. It’s getting late, our legs are tired, and we all lay down to look at the sky. Ron’s there. I have to be home soon. The sunset is warm and orange on our faces, and if you look beyond the fences, beyond the roofs and the trees, it’s like it lasts forever. We are all young and healthy. We

have long, happy lives ahead of us.

I don’t know how much of this memory is true. All I know for sure are these two facts: a boy died, and this story isn’t even about him. I’m sorry.