EULOGY EXAMPLES

Eulogy for Father, Dr. William I. Buscemi, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus, Political Science, Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio

Hello. Hope everyone is enjoying breakfast.

Breakfast was a deliberate choice today, since making breakfast was a specialty of Dad’s all his life. I remember he’d make it for my sister and me on winter mornings before school, when it was still dark and freezing out. Hot chocolate, orange juice, French toast, you name it. And while we ate, Dad would step outside in his old Army jacket to heat up the giant green Chevy and chip ice off the windshield.

Him making breakfasts for three before school had of course started long before my sister and I showed up, back in the 1950s at the family restaurant, Ann & Tony’s in West Jefferson, Ohio, when he and his two younger brothers were kids, back before Dad met my mom, Colleen, who he would go on to be married to for two thirds of a century. Way back then, Dad would make bacon, eggs and toast for his younger brother Tom and his even younger brother Mike.

And Dad would tell a story from that time, that his youngest brother, my Uncle Mike, apparently had a tummy. And in winter, no matter how many shirts and sweaters and coats they’d pile on little Uncle Mike, when he’d put his hands way up over his head, it would all lift up to show off his belly.

And Dad said everyone would crack up and recite a poem. And I apologize if it isn’t very culturally sensitive today, but they’d say “He’s a little Hindu, who does what he kin do. When his shirt and pants don’t meet, he just makes his skin do!”

And Dad continued making breakfast his whole life. Especially on vacation, for example down in Sarasota, Florida, where, when he retired 20 years ago after a third of a century as a professor at Wittenberg University, he and Mom got an adorable little winter unit at Sun-N-Fun RV Park. Dad would enhance the morning meal with cantaloupe and fresh oranges from the local Amish grocery, as family members and others who visited them down there can attest.

And Dad taught me that the trick to breakfast is extra toast and bacon. Polite people won’t ask for it, Dad would say, but everybody wants it, so just put it out.

Dad was full of good advice. As I went off to college, he said “Son? Try to develop a taste for cheap beer. It’s not that different, and you’ll save a lot of money in the long run.”

He had keen political insights too. Said Jimmy Carter was the best former head of state we’d ever had. Said in fact that Carter should’ve skipped the White House entirely and gone straight to ex-President.

Yep, Dad was lively.

So when word came last month that his Alzheimer’s had progressed to the end stage, I could scarcely believe it. He’d gone in one short month from mobile and alert to mostly in bed, indeed ready for hospice.

I was pretty shaken. I couldn’t wrap my head around such a mighty engine being slowed. He’d never so much as used a cane or walker before in his life, and he’d taken long brisk walks in the park every day before he went into care just a year before–just over a year ago.

So I flew from California to Ohio to see him for what I knew would be the last time.

And something happened. I can’t explain it, but once I saw him, I felt better. He wasn’t conscious as such, but neither was he agitated or in pain. Had no tubes in him, wasn’t clammy or sweaty or trembling. In bed at noon, which wasn’t like him, but calm. At peace. He hadn’t lost that robustness, that physical ease he always had.

But he was ready to go. You could see that.

And the whole time, Dad kept muttering quietly the most interesting thing, that he was “thinking about thinking.”

Thinking about thinking.

Now, for a professor like Dad was, that’s breaking the sound barrier. That’s as good as it gets. The world’s greatest spiritual leaders seldom achieve “thinking about thinking.” Swamis, bishops, monks all fail. But here Dad is, on his way out, pulling it off. Grasping enlightenment. Achieving nirvana. Thinking about thinking.

He was a scholar through and through, beloved by his students, as evidenced by the outpouring of tributes on Wittenberg University’s Facebook page after his death.

One person wrote, “I graduated in 1993 and still tell people about Buscemi’s classes. They were life-changing. He ran the kind of engaging, thought-provoking classroom that every student deserves. I’m so honored to have been one of his students.”

The next person said “His classes were the best at Wittenberg.” I repeat that comment with apologies to the other professors here at the memorial today.

Someone else wrote “Buscemi was my favorite professor. And what an obituary! Perfectly written!”

Oh, I’m sorry–I didn’t mean to include that part. About the perfectly written obituary. Which I myself did indeed write. Apologies. And thank you.

But as I wrote in that obit, Dad was by all accounts a menace on his high school football team at defensive end. Not very big, not very fast, but fearless. And tough. He said his strategy was simple: to knock down every guy in sight until he got to the one with the ball.

So people asked him as he headed off to Notre Dame for college whether he planned to try out there as a walk-on. Dad answered “Are you kidding me? I’m from a podunk school in Ohio! Notre Dame football players? Those guys don’t have necks!”

To his credit, Dad was equally humble about the sports he was not good at, which was … all the rest of them.

In fact, he’d tell this story, and it would crack us up.

So to set it up, you’ve got to understand that West Jefferson High was so small that they needed every able-bodied guy to play whatever sport the others wanted to play to be able to field a team at all.

So Dad got to play football, but he also felt morally obligated to play … golf.

See, Dad’s best friend, Bob Wagner, who later married my mom’s sister and became my uncle (but that’s another story), was as good at golf as my dad was at football.

And how high school golf works is, each golfer squares up against one opponent. Your best golfer plays their best, your second best plays their second best, and on down the line to my Dad and whoever Dad’s opponent was at the bottom.

And Uncle Bob, no matter how good his opponent was, would always win. While poor Dad, despite playing a succession of other teams’ worst golfers, always lost. So Uncle Bob and Dad would cancel each other out, and the West Jefferson team would win or lose based on how all the middle golfers did.

So to bring the story home, football and golf aside, neither Dad nor Uncle Bob were remotely good at a third sport—basketball.

In fact, Dad told me that he and Uncle Bob were the sixth and seventh men on the varsity squad. They watched from the bench their senior year as their five teammates lost twenty straight regular-season games, plus two more in a double-elimination tournament. 0 and 22. And the worst part—I mean the best part—was that West Jefferson only had five blue varsity jerseys, so Dad and Uncle Bob had to wear yellow junior varsity uniforms that whole time.

And another story about Dad having to wear an embarrassing outfit–and full disclosure, this story was a favorite of both my first wife and now my current wife—happened when Dad and Mom went on a cruise, I’ll say in the late-’90s, and there was an Old West night planned on the ship. Well, Mom was game and had packed outfits for them both, and sure enough, come the big night, they show up at dinner, and that quick someone says to Dad, “Well hey, everybody–look! If it ain’t Howdy-Doody!”

Mom said Dad about set a land-speed record sprinting back to their cabin to remove his adorable red-and-white-checked neckerchief.

They had some good times.

And he was a good man. He couldn’t stand to see people suffering or run down. He always looked out for the underdog. The one thing that would earn you a smack at my house was to disparage anyone’s race or disability or social status or differentness. I’m proud of that legacy from Dad and Mom. They were ahead of their time that way.

But perhaps above all, Dad was a philosopher. He loved some good conversation at the end of the day over a Canadian Mist and 7-Up on a patio chair overlooking some trees or a body of water, whether in Ohio or down in Florida.

In fact, in the 1980s Mom and Dad bought a little trailer parked at Buckeye Lake here in Ohio, and Dad would say at night over the fire, “You know how everyone says they come out here to get away from ‘the real world’? Well, I’m not so sure. What if jobs and school and the rat race are the made-up part, and this out here is ‘The Real World’?”

And sure enough, one Christmas, one of their Buckeye Lake neighbors gave them one of those carved wooden cabin signs as a present, which they’d commissioned to say “The Real World.” Which my parents hung in a succession of other trailers and cabins they owned thereafter through the years, and which my wife and I now have displayed in our living room in Los Angeles.

This was a tough handful of years just now, trying to get Dad the care he needed. But he reached the ripe old age of 86, and now that he’s gone, I’ve been able to concentrate on the light and warmth and laughter of his first eight decades. Which is what we’re here to remember and celebrate today.

So thanks for coming. We’ve asked the caterers to put another round of toast and bacon out like Dad would have wanted, so please go help yourselves.

___________

Eulogy for Mother, Jean Colleen Buscemi

Political Activist, Social Worker, Mischief Maker, Springfield, Ohio

Welcome, everyone. I’m happy to be at this hotel this afternoon. Mom and Dad would often meet friends here for drinks.

Let me start by saying that Dad now lives in a dementia care facility across town. You can visit him if you like. He is physically well and energetic and can speak, though he can’t comprehend much anymore and almost certainly won’t remember who you are. He was taken to visit Mom in hospice twice before she passed, but today would have just been too much for him. Let’s all please hold him in our thoughts.

So where to begin? In preparing these remarks, I read there’s a tradition in Ireland that when someone passes, neighbors and friends pull pranks and tell jokes to comfort the grieving, much to the dismay of the Catholic Church. Which is perfect for my Irish mother Colleen, whose three favorite things were pranks and jokes and dismaying the Catholic Church.

So I thought, okay, I’ll give two speeches for Mom today. First a proper, sad eulogy. Then later, funny stories.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that with Mom, you couldn’t separate the two—the sorrow from the celebration, the tears from the joy.

So we’ll start by celebrating her marriage to Dad, which was full of pranks and jokes.

Now Dad could be funny, but he was at heart an esteemed university professor, a man of dignity and authority. As such, Mom jumped at any chance to jerk his chain.

First example, one Halloween when I was in grade school, Mom and Dad showed up with all the other parents for the annual student body costume parade around the playground. And this one year, Mom alone among all the parents wore a costume.

Naturally, I was mortified. But also confused. Because Mom’s costume didn’t make sense. It had just two parts–a pair of black-rimmed novelty glasses with the big plastic nose attached, and one of Dad’s windbreakers. That was it. And Dad, who of course wore prescription black frame glasses atop his large Sicilian nose, hadn’t worn any costume at all. Just another of his windbreakers.

When I got home, I was outraged. I demanded to know how Mom could embarrass me like that in front of my classmates. And what the heck was she supposed to be, anyways? Mom said “Oh, honey! Didn’t you get it? Your dad and I went as twins!”

I promise you, Dad had no idea.

And Mom was happiest when someone she loved fell into a body of water. Again, especially Dad.

One story goes, one fine summer morning, call it 1985, they were at their little cottage at Indian Lake in Ohio. Mom was still asleep inside, and Dad took a lawn chair, coffee and a newspaper onto the boat dock for a quiet moment alone. Of course, that quick Dad manages to fall right into the drink. Mortified, but with no witnesses around, Dad scrambles ashore and runs back inside the cottage to change.

“Everything okay?” Mom asks from bed, just waking up. “Sure, sure, everything’s fine,” Dad swears. But Mom is suspicious, and once she gets up, she wanders outside to investigate, sees Dad's plastic coffee mug and the editorial page floating off toward the lily pads and starts laughing uncontrollably for about an hour and a half. Mom couldn’t have been happier if she’d found $400 in the street.

Another story. When I was age 14, I bothered Mom all year for a moped for Christmas. I wasn’t hopeful, but I lobbied anyway. So come the day, Mom hands me a package, which I unwrap to find—I kid you not—the head of a mop.

“What is this, Mom?”

“What do you mean? You said you wanted a mop head.”

“Moped, Mom! I wanted a moped!”

“Well, a mop head will be more useful, sweetie. And if you’re good, next Christmas I’ll get you a handle for it.”

Oh, Mom was proud of that one.

Eccentric gift-giving was her specialty. She once bought at a garage sale a brick with the words “Merry Christmas” stamped on it, wrapped it in a shoebox and gave it to her brother John.

John was intrigued. “It’s so heavy!” he mused aloud as he unwrapped it.

Once he opened it, Mom starts howling uncontrollably, retrieves the Merry Christmas brick so she can wrap it for the next unsuspecting person on her list. Mom pulled this trick on dozens of people through the years.

She was always a kid at heart. A very weird kid.

She’d ask you as a small child what kind of sounds an animal makes, then make up some nonsense noise on the spot and get you to repeat it. “What sound does a giraffe make, Rob?” she’d ask me. “OOOOOOOH!” And “How about a zebra? “AYYYYYYYYE!”

And she always had squirt guns, which she’d shoot out the car at unsuspecting pedestrians. That’s true.

A striking, well dressed woman, she’d ask the mannequins at JC Penney for help. “Excuse me, ma’am, can you direct my son and me toward your sock department?”

“MOOOOOM,” I’d complain.

But neither of my parents would abide cruelty. The one thing that would earn you a smack in our house was derision or mockery toward the vulnerable, be they a minority, gay, poor, disabled, what have you.

She was a committed activist for her causes too. One of Mom’s good friends was named Lucretia, who was in a wheelchair and had great difficulty speaking as a result of MS. And Lucretia was named a delegate, along with Mom, for Al Gore to the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. And Mom wound up traveling with Lucretia, driving her to and from the Staples Center and wheeling her onto and off the convention floor.

And of course all the Democratic stars of the day were there. And the story goes that after one long day of speeches, Mom was wheeling Lucretia to their van in a handicapped spot just outside the convention doors, and who should they see appear but civil rights legend Jesse Jackson.

Mom gets excited, starts pointing at Lucretia. “Jesse! Jesse! My friend wants to meet you! My friend wants to meet you!”

Sure enough, Jesse comes over. Mom gives his handler her camera to get a photo and they all chat until the handler pulls Jesse away.

Once in the van, Lucretia starts laughing uncontrollably. She thought it was hilarious that Mom would take advantage of her handicap to meet Jesse Jackson.

Mom denied any such agenda. “Well my gosh, Lucretia! I thought you’d want to meet him! It had nothing to do with me! I’ve never been so insulted in my life! That’ll teach me to look out for my friends!”

Mom’s protests made Lucretia laugh even harder. Lucretia busted Mom’s chops about that for the rest of her life, and Mom always responded the same way, pouting, acting offended, denying she’d ever do such a thing. It was a little routine they had.

So this eulogy is heading into the homestretch.

They took Mom to Mercy hospital just two weeks before she died because of some symptoms around what appears to have been lymphoma, which is difficult to detect because it involves the blood and the lymph nodes rather than any specific part of the body, and its symptoms can be gradual and match all kinds of other things. So Mom never had to get a scary diagnosis or endure chemotherapy or a bone marrow transplant or anything like that, for which I’m grateful.

But in recent weeks, she began to feel fatigued, her appetite dipped, and she had some joint pain. So they brought her to the hospital to run some tests.

My sister Sarah and her kids were at Mom’s bedside around the clock during Mom’s final days, for which I’m also grateful, since everything happened quite fast and I only managed to arrive from California on Mom’s final afternoon. By which point Mom was pretty out of it on pain meds and clearly ready to go.

It was disorienting to find Mom that way. I’d never seen her unresponsive, and I didn’t really know what to do with myself. I’d never been next to Mom when she wasn’t joking and laughing and talking and teasing. Never once.

But as it happened, the day before, our old neighbor and Mom’s close friend Jan Chase, whose family lived across Crestview Drive my entire childhood, had said she’d like to see Mom in hospice.

And sure enough, my phone rings. “I’m in the lobby,” Jan says. So my wife and I go down and bring her up to Mom’s room. Jan sits by Mom’s bed, proceeds to recall all the mischief she and Mom got up to through the years. And it’s hilarious. Jan could have earned a following on talk radio.

She recounted the time Mom sent emergency lasagna over to Jan’s house for dinner when a whole group of Chases showed up unexpectedly. Except in the lasagna, instead of a layer of ground beef, Mom put down a layer of mud at the bottom of the dish. I’m not making this up.

Now mind you, the Chases and their relatives are characters, and they knew Mom was a wildcard. “What in hell did Colleen do this time!? Who puts dirt in lasagna!” Now my family had gone out to dinner that night, so before we got back, several Chases cross the street and throw pasta all over our garage, windows, door handles, everywhere. These were not college kids, mind you—all parties involved were about age 40, give or take. And to be fair, Mom started it. The Chases were just meeting fire with fire. They had to preserve their honor.

Needless to say, when we got home, my dad was not amused.

Next, Jan recounts a standard gag Mom used to pull, where when Mom saw someone she knew at the grocery, she’d secretly sneak some strange meat item into that person’s shopping cart, which they’d only discover at checkout, when they had to sheepishly ask the cashier to re-shelf the pigs feet or fish heads or whatever it was.

So an hour flies by, and finally it’s time for Jan to leave. She reaches up to stroke Mom’s hair and says, “Save me a chair up there next to you, sweetheart. When I get there, we’ll raise some hell together.”

I said “Jan, what are you talking about? You can’t raise hell in heaven!”

Jan looks at me, says, “Oh, your mom and I can, darlin’. I promise you.”

And then we walked Jan out. And that was the last time I saw Mom. She passed that night.

Love you, Mom. We’ll all miss you.

Thanks so much for coming, everyone.