- Kennedy Buhere reflects on why eulogies should focus on the deceased rather than those delivering them.
- He argues that tributes should celebrate the deceased’s character, accomplishments, values and influence on other people.
- Drawing on personal experience and famous speeches, Buhere highlights the principles that should guide meaningful eulogies.
Some fifteen years ago, I attended a burial ceremony at a village in Kakamega County where mourners booed a man who interlaced his tribute to the deceased with stories about how much more intelligent he was while the two were in school.
The Master of Ceremony of the burial ceremony had let the man, a close relative of the deceased, give his tribute.
He told the mourners that the deceased had been his classmate during the colonial days. Fair enough.
However, the mourners refused to swallow his attempt to demonstrate that the deceased wasn’t as bright as he was. He irked the mourners when he claimed that he not only beat the deceased in school-level examinations but that he beat him in the Common Entrance Examinations (CEE) and the Kenya African Preparatory Examinations (KAPE) in class four and eight respectively.
The remarks drew sneers from the mourners. He was forced to readjust the tenor of his speech.
I smiled when they mocked the speaker—a long-serving teacher who had by then retired from the service.
I smiled for two reasons: first, here was an experienced former primary school teacher, who had certainly taught English to an entire generation but didn’t know the protocols, the manners that inform public speaking in general, and eulogies in particular.
Secondly, I smiled because the mourners knew better than he, an educated man.
The mourners knew something about a eulogy or tribute which this teacher didn’t know or ignored. It is that a eulogy is a spoken or written tribute praising the life and accomplishments of a person who has passed away. It is certainly not about the living. It doesn’t matter how much more intelligent or better positioned in life the speaker may have been than the deceased. It doesn’t matter how much you helped the deceased. What you did for the deceased is not the theme of a tribute. Tawe.
The deceased may have been an exalted or great person in society. It doesn’t matter. The people who eulogise him or her are normally close relatives, family friends or workmates.
Members in all these categories may have shared a life, experiences and insights with the deceased. It is the substance of the impressions the deceased left on them or the impressions the living had of the deceased that forms the substance of the tribute.
The impressions are unavoidably personal, reflective and tasteful. In many ways, eulogies are intangible mementos, memorabilia or gifts to both the departed and the attendees. They help the mourners, through the speakers chosen, to reflect and remember the loved one.
Eulogies also serve as a way for loved ones to express their grief, share memories and celebrate the life of the deceased.
The tributes affirm certain traits, values and vision or visions of life that guided the deceased in his family, career or life in general. A eulogy provides a perfect opportunity to share the legacy of the deceased.
Mourners ask questions like, “What did the deceased value in life? Which virtues did he or she show? How did the deceased handle the strife ‘in the world’s broad field of battle’? How did he manage the difficulties associated with marriage? How did he or she manage those things that husbands and wives face in the family?”
What about professional success or failure? How did he manage success or what society considers as success? Was he amiable or a loner?
A eulogy is not about the successes of the speaker or those still living. It doesn’t matter how bright he may have been. It doesn’t matter how well educated, how widely travelled or how highly placed he was when in his prime of life.
The tribute is about the man or woman lying in the casket—the person about to be interred in a few days’ time. The presumed more intelligent or generous living person will have his time—when it is his turn to lie in the casket. He must wait for his time. The family members, friends and relatives who will outlive him will talk about him or her.
For now, we should let the deceased have his or her moment in the sun. It is time for the speakers to talk about how they knew the deceased. The perspective each speaker brings to bear on the deceased is almost always personal so that each mourner present comes to know bits and pieces of information about the deceased which were unknown to him or her.
The overall picture of the deceased is inevitably composite, all-rounded. Unless politicians hijack the burial ceremony to market themselves, the mourners leave the home enriched and ennobled.
Lessons from famous eulogies
The same principles that inform eulogies at the village level are what inform the substance of eulogies at the national level. The speakers might be Presidents, governors, Cabinet Secretaries, Kings or Ambassadors. The referent, the object of the speech, must be the deceased: what he accomplished, what person he was.
Two examples from the history of public speaking or rhetoric: one nonfiction and the other fictional.
When the US statesman Senator Edward Kennedy died, Obama stepped forth and eulogised him. He dwelt on the long public service Senator Edward Kennedy gave the US, enumerated some of the things he did, concluding:
“Ted Kennedy has gone home now, guided by his faith and by the light of those he has loved and lost. At last he is with them once more, leaving those of us who grieve his passing with the memories he gave, the good he did, the dream he kept alive, and a single, enduring image – the image of a man on a boat; white mane tousled; smiling broadly as he sails into the wind, ready for what storms may come, carrying on toward some new and wondrous place just beyond the horizon.”
We have Mark Antony in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I refer not to his well-known “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” in which he condemned Brutus and his co-conspirators, but his tribute to Brutus, who was killed during the civil war that ensued after the assassination of Caesar.
Coming upon the body of Brutus a few minutes after his fall, Antony speaks right away, saying:
“This was the noblest Roman of them all./All the conspirators save only he/Did that they did in envy of great Caesar./He only, in a general honest thought/And common good to all, made one of them./His life was gentle, and the elements/So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up/And say to all the world ‘This was a man!’”
Tributes are about the good utterances and good deeds wrought by the deceased and not those still living.
Little wonder that priests who preside over the burial of the dead invoke Philippians 4:8 in the New Testament: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
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The deceased is always the silent guest of honour during a funeral. Focus is always on him. Not the living. It doesn’t matter how mighty a mourner might be. Nor how beneficent he was to the deceased. Let him or her tell us a story about the deceased. And the attendees at the funeral will lend the speaker their ears.
By Kennedy Buhere
Kennedy Buhere is Communication Specialist
Email: buhere2003@gmail.com
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