Paying tribute to someone who died
2 min read
There is no right way to pay tribute to someone who died, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But there are patterns, and knowing them helps when you are standing in the middle of it with no idea where to start.
Tributes fall into four kinds.
Words
The eulogy at the service. The sympathy card. The post on the day. The thing you say out loud at a table a year later.
Words are the most common tribute and the most fragile. A eulogy that took a week to write is heard once, by fifty people, half of whom were too undone to follow it. Unless someone writes it down, it is gone by the following spring.
If you take one practical thing from this page: keep the words. The eulogy, the cards, the messages people sent in the first week. They are the most honest record of who someone was, written by the people who knew them, and they are never collected anywhere.
Objects
A ring that gets worn. A jumper nobody washes. A photograph framed on a hallway wall. A bench with a name on it.
Objects work because they are physical and unavoidable — you walk past them. But they are singular: one person keeps the ring. A family of four has one jumper and three people who remember it.
Places
A grave. A niche. A garden. A stretch of coast where the ashes went. A pub table.
A place is the strongest tribute of all, because it is shared: everyone can go, and going is itself the act. Its limit is distance. A family scattered across three countries has a place that most of them will visit twice in their lives.
Dates
The anniversary of the death. Their birthday. Christmas, which nobody warns you about.
Dates do the work of remembering without anyone organizing it. The risk is that they sit unmarked, everyone assuming someone else will say something, and the day passes in silence with four people thinking about the same person.
Choosing one that lasts
Whatever form it takes, a tribute needs somewhere to live. That is the thing most families discover too late.
The photographs are on five phones. The eulogy is in one person's drafts. The voicemail — the one nobody can bring themselves to delete — is on a handset that will be replaced within three years. The cards are in a drawer.
None of it is lost yet. All of it is scattered, and scattered is how things get lost: not thrown away, just never gathered, until the person who knew where everything was is no longer there to ask.
Gathering it in one place is unglamorous work, and it is the only kind of tribute that survives the people who made it.