![]() ![]() He never thought long before giving his reply: “I’ll let you know when I grow up.” That was Dad, ever the clown. I recall asking Dad what he wanted to be when he was a child, that frequent “what did you want to be when you grew up” question. I suppose this is how grief works, how we protect ourselves from sorrow through obscurity. But then, in the words of Virginia Woolf, “Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us.” And since his death-his bodily death-my brain seems shrouded by fog. In those imaginations, the ideas and phrasings seemed clear, free-flowing at the forefront of my mind. Because I knew what would happen I knew what would happen the moment he took his final breath. ![]() Not in some macabre sense, but rather as preparation, for the inevitable. And so, while my words contain an elegiac melody that defines mourning, I hope you will hear it instead as a song of praise for the man who I proudly called “Dad.”īefore Dad passed, I imagined this eulogy. Formed from the Greek roots eu-, meaning “good,” and logos, meaning “speech,” eulogy conveys the notion of a “good speech” or praise about the individual. The first-elegy-can be traced to the Greek word elegos, which translates as “song of mourning.” The second and more common word-eulogy-also comes from Greek, but communicates something different. ![]() In English, according to Merriam-Webster, there are two words we use for a speech given in remembrance of one who has passed. ![]()
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