My loved ones tell me that I have a gift for eulogies. I don’t know what kind of thing that is to say to a person, but I know that they’re right. To write about another—their light, their dark, their joy, their pride—is to me, a profound act of love.
When Doug died from suicide in 2011, I wanted to tell the world about how when I was 18, he wrote a receipt on a legal pad to document that I’d bought his 1969 convertible Dodge Dart for $1 (tax purposes). And how I sobbed big, monstrous sobs in a McDonald’s parking lot when I sold it for cash two years later but then quickly took a $5 bill out of the envelope to buy a Filet O Fish. Or how the first time my mom ever brought him home, I secretly named him the Killer Rabbit Man because of his long white beard and also the fact I thought he may kill us (he went on to sign a decade’s worth of birthday cards, “KRM”). Or how everything about him ultimately gifted me an essential life lesson: just because you sell weed out of paint buckets doesn’t mean you didn’t also go to law school.
Doug was my mom’s best friend and he was an almost mythical figure in my life. He lent me his Steinbeck anthology, read my writing, and found great joy in trying to convince the servers at Carrabba’s that my name was Ralph Anne.
“Ralph Anne, did you want another minestrone?” “Apologies, Ralph Anne can be a bit shy!” “Could you bring another shirley temple for Ralph Anne?”
When he died, I wanted the world to know that he was a universe, that we are all a universe.
There is, though, an overwhelm of love and loyalty that claws at my throat, keeping my fingers from their place on the keyboard. Like now, how do I ever tell you enough about my two grandmothers now gone? Judith Mae (May 1943 - January 2025) and Bettie Temple (October 1933 - September 2023) were worlds unto themselves. I sit here born of them, both NASCAR and Monet, Blue Grass and Les Mis, Wal-Mart and Chico’s. I am a disciple of remembrance and I ache to share it all, my letters to survival.
My greatest dream is that I am able to telegraph my love for everyone who’s ever crossed my path–everyone who’s ever shaped me, held me, fed me. To everyone who works at a strip mall or on a used car lot or in a gallery–onto stories that reach others, so that they too may be reminded they are a universe – that we are all ridiculous and beautiful and wrong and right and funny and serious.
I don’t want to wait for eulogies, I want love and catharsis for us here and now. The weight of hell aside, 2025 will be a time to hone in. May this year make me brave enough to write from my knees.
