The Eulogy

By G. L. Horton
copyright 2004 Geralyn Horton

When my father died all these people came up to me or sent

me cards saying they felt with me in my loss. What loss?
How could they? If they thought it was a loss, they didn't
really know me. They didn't know him, either-- or rather,
they knew him the way most people knew him: the public
man. Not what he was to me, not in private.

My father had so many friends, he was active in all these

charities and in the town and people all thought he was so
generous and charming. Not to me! I was the family
scapegoat, his punching bag. But I can't say that, can I? No
one would believe it. Except my sister. She's often said to me
that she could never understand why my father was so cold
and cruel to me. If he had behaved towards her as he did to
me, she couldn't have stood it, she says. I couldn't stand it
either, but what could I do?

Comes the funeral, everyone said to me, "You're creative,

you're the writer, you must write something that can be read
in synagogue." What could I write? What could I say that
wouldn't be a lie? He's my father, yes. But as soon as I could
I put distance between us, to put a limit to how much he
could hurt me. Am I to say that? Shame the family? In the
end, I went around and gathered little stories from people,
about his charm and his jokes and his good deeds, and put
them together as "so and so says about my father that..."
even though to me he was nothing like that. I don't think
anybody noticed that it was all hearsay, not admissible in
court. I didn't actually say anything in my own voice. Not a
word of false witness-- just a false impression, with the
terrible black facts left out.
Shakespeare says "the evil that men do lives after them, the
good is oft interred with their bones." But here it's the
opposite. I am burying the evil, consigning it to silence. All
those years in the family he must have thought that what he
was doing to me was right, that he was doing the right thing
according to some principle or other. He was a righteous
man. Everyone said so. But what principle? When he was
cruel to me, when he punished me for no reason, no one
ever questioned it or confronted him. I tried, but he never
explained. "You know what you've done," he'd say. But I
didn't know, I don't know to this day, and no one else knows
either. When I asked them they'd say, "you did nothing, you
don't deserve this"-- or "that's just how he is. It isn't fair but
what can you do?"

At the funeral I wanted to speak up at last: to say he wasn't

fair, he was terrible and cruel to me-- can't any of you tell
me why? You knew him. Give me some sort of explanation! I
can't forgive what I don't understand! And that's the truth. I
can't forgive him. But as God's my witness, I can forget him.
I have the strength. I can let my father's dark side go in
silence into his grave, to be interred with his bones -- and let
his good live after him. Amen.

END