![]() ![]() 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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