Death marks the final boundary between life and whatever comes next. While some find comfort in the idea of an afterlife, I personally take solace in the notion that it is absolute nothingness. In that nothingness, all life and all our thoughts are united in total oblivion: the inescapable fate that awaits everything. I once scribbled a note in my journal: “Death is the ultimate form of order.” In my view, it truly is the ultimate order and the ultimate peace.
Yet for all this philosophical acceptance, the reality of death is still intensely emotional. The more beautiful and intimate our memories of someone, the more bitter and painful their loss feels. For those who love deeply, death can never be fully rationalized away.
Last week, one of my grandmothers passed away, and a family member asked me to write and deliver her eulogy at the funeral. I consider it a great honour to speak at such significant events. I gave my first eulogy twenty years ago at the funeral of one of my grandfathers. Twelve years later, I did the same at my father’s funeral, and a few years after that, I even spoke at my brother’s wedding.
In fact, my family jokes that I’ve become the designated speaker for every major occasion—“Bas van Haren: for all your parties and celebrations,” as we like to say.
As expected, I once again found myself delivering a eulogy, this time for my grandmother.
Ceremony
I have always been intrigued not so much by death itself but by all the ceremony and ritual that surrounds it: the procedures, the speeches, the music. As a child, I was fascinated by the pageantry of funerals. I vividly remember watching the funeral of Belgium’s King Baudouin live on television when I was about eight years old. The ceremony was solemn and steeped in protocol, with subdued pomp and circumstance. It left a huge impression on me.
My parents didn’t understand my fascination. I recall that it was a Saturday, and they insisted we go out for our usual grocery shopping, which meant turning off the TV mid-broadcast. “He’s long dead and buried,” I can still hear my father saying, perplexed by my interest. But something about the dignity and tradition of that royal funeral stayed with me.
That aspect of ceremony and dignity continued to captivate me as I grew older. At twenty years old, I had the chance to speak at a funeral for the first time, and by then I was old enough to fully appreciate what it meant. The occasion was the funeral of my grandfather on my father’s side (Opa van Haren), who had died after a long illness. The service was held in a Catholic church, and with all its liturgy and ritual, it carried the same solemn sense of protocol I remembered from King Baudouin’s funeral.
One moment during Opa’s farewell affected me more than any other. It came a day before the service, during the final viewing, when it was time to close his coffin. The honour of sealing the coffin shut fell to my uncle, Opa’s eldest son. I was there as well, placing a few old guilder coins in the coffin with Opa as a final gesture. It was my way of helping him ‘pay’ the ferryman at the river Styx for passage to the afterlife, a small nod to the old Greek myth.
Other family members took the opportunity to say their personal goodbyes in their own unique ways. One of my aunts, who had come all the way from New Zealand, performed a loud, high-pitched chant, something she had picked up from a Māori funeral tradition. I remember my uncle catching my eye during that performance; both of us were struggling not to laugh at the unexpectedness of it during our grief. In the end, everyone has their own way of saying farewell. My coins for the ferryman were no more or less superstitious than her mourning chant. Different gestures, same love and respect.
Eulogy as solace
Expecting a death due to old age or a prolonged illness allows for some preparation for the inevitable. In my experience though, the losses that hit the hardest are those that come suddenly and far too soon. The news of an aunt’s accidental death in 2013 was devastating. The shock left her immediate family utterly numb. Although I’m usually the first to volunteer a few words at a service, in this case I was not emotionally able to step up and speak. My grief was too raw.
In our mourning, we had to let others do the speaking (and singing) for us. At my aunt’s funeral, the readings and music chosen were beautiful, offering us all space for reflection and comfort. It reminded me that a well-crafted ceremony, or even a single eulogy, provides exactly that: a chance to reflect, to find a bit of solace, and to feel a moment of peace amid the pain.
Fast forward to this past week, when my grandmother passed. A relative asked me to write a eulogy because they didn’t feel capable of doing it themselves. I understood that my words would ultimately be for them, for the family and friends left behind. That’s really the purpose of a eulogy: to offer comfort, to instill a sense of pride in the life that was lived, and to honour the memory of the departed on behalf of everyone who loved them.
Composing a eulogy is, in many ways, like crafting a story. I discovered this while writing eulogies for my grandfather, then my father, and my grandmother. It’s literally giving the deceased a final word, laying out the facts of their life one final time, woven together with personal values and treasured anecdotes. By doing this, we bring the deceased person back into our minds, fusing an objective account of their life with a hint of subjective idealization. The very word “eulogy” comes from the Greek for “a good word,” and it’s fitting: we strive to speak nothing but good of the dead.
Death is surrender
No matter how meticulously you arrange your funeral plans or document your wishes, once you’re gone, you ultimately lose control of the narrative. Your secrets, thoughts, and preferences accompany you to the afterlife. You cannot truly govern from the afterlife. Life, and all decisions about it, inevitably belong to the living.
After my grandmother’s death, for example, several conflicting stories began to circulate about what her last wishes really were. People love to talk, and soon enough there was a buzz of contradictory information and surprise over what she supposedly wanted. At one point we believed she had even put certain wishes in writing, but when the time came, that record was nowhere to be found. In the end, decisions had to be made regardless, and naturally those choices reflected the personal and religious convictions of the family members who took charge of the arrangements. Her funeral ended up being what they thought it should be.
This loss of personal control before and after death was something my husband and I thought about seriously during the COVID-19 pandemic. We worried about what might happen if one of us were to fall critically ill or die, especially regarding who would have the authority to make decisions on our behalf. I have a close-knit family who largely shares my values, but the same couldn’t be said for my husband’s family. So, as a practical safeguard, we decided to enter a registered partnership. By taking that step, we ensured that if something tragic happened, the person who truly understood and cared for us would be legally empowered to make the important choices.
Thankfully, we haven’t had to face such a situation. But we have witnessed instances where, for example, a queer acquaintance passed away and their funeral was arranged in a way that clashed completely with the person’s own identity and wishes. We wanted to do everything we could to prevent that kind of outcome in our own lives. It was a sobering reminder: after death, control over one’s story and legacy passes into the hands of others, for better or worse.
Canonization
All of this leads me to believe that a eulogy (and really the entire ritual around death) often says more about the people left behind than about the person who died. Looking back at the eulogy I delivered for my grandmother, I realize it was a blend of plain facts, personal memories, and values.
But whose values? The facts were objective enough, but my memories were, of course, selective, and the values I emphasized were my own. The dead do not speak, so we, the survivors, do the talking and the interpreting for them, whether we realize it or not.
What we do as bereaved loved ones is handle everything the way we think best, according to our values and our recollection of the deceased. A person can outline their preferences to the letter, but when push comes to shove, they don’t get the final say. That power rests with those who remain, and we often exercise it in a way that makes sense to us and brings us comfort.
I think of this phenomenon as a kind of canonization. I don’t mean canonization in the strict religious sense of declaring someone a saint, but the parallel is striking. We tend to ascribe special qualities and almost virtuous perfection to our lost loved ones, the way saints are venerated and credited with heavenly glory. Except we do it on an earthly plane, in our own private ceremonies.
Tellingly, the Greek root of canonization, κανονίζω (kanonízō), means “to arrange, define, or legitimize.” In a sense, that’s exactly what we’re doing: we arrange and define the narrative of the departed’s life to legitimize the way we want to remember them.
In my own family, those who have passed away have by now been canonized in this way, each in their own loving narrative. I know I’ve contributed to that through the eulogies I’ve written and delivered. Because they could no longer speak, I spoke for them. Because they could no longer act, we, their loved ones, stepped in to arrange their farewells as we saw fit. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Once you pass away, do your personal funeral wishes truly matter, or is it just self-indulgent and over-individualistic to think they should? Or should funerals instead be arranged purely for the comfort of the living, the deceased’s life story neatly canonized in the bereaved’s hearts and remains quietly laid to rest, tucked away and archived in an urn or a grave plot?
Would the dead care one bit about what happens? Given my belief in a great oblivion after death, I would say not.
In the end, everything we do, the ceremonies, the eulogies, the rituals, is really for those who remain. Their hearts are the ones that need mending.
Blessed are those who sleep united in oblivion. Burdened are the grieving souls who are left behind.