Read Eulogy | a short tragedy :: Afterword

If you've made it this far, I'd like to thank you. Eulogy holds a very dear spot in my heart. It was a simple story idea I had one night while watching a show with my mother, and I knew immediately it was a story I had to tell. Eulogy touches me deeply because I lost my youngest brother several years ago. He was six, and I was nine. The anniversary of his death passed in January, and Eulogy was created exactly 18 days after that date. Grief is a strange, tragic, and dare I even say beautiful thing. To create such strong bonds in a lifetime that even after death you love them just as much, if not more, is the very essence of life.

Eulogy, however short it may be, is a story of love, growth, grief, despair, and taking proper time to grieve. A lot of the time, we're taught that we have to move on from our grief quickly. That we can't let it consume us, and that our loved ones wouldn't want that. But grief is something that requires time to process. Some people take days, some take months, some take years, some take decades, and some never quite recover. I've yet to fully move on from my grief, but after meeting my best friend of three years, I've learned that that is okay. People tend to hide grief, to shove it away as if it's something shameful. But it isn't. Grief is a part of life, something everyone experiences or causes. It shouldn't be hidden away like it's a crime. Grief is a celebration of love. You don't grieve for strangers or people you hate, after all.

Eulogy tries to capture this. Kyle deeply and truly loved Lance, and you can't very well expect him to move on in just two weeks and be completely composed at his funeral. I know I was a horrible mess at my brother's. The entire story is Kyle speaking, hence why the quotation marks only ever close at the end of the story. Right from the beginning I knew that I wanted the story to be Lance's eulogy from Kyle. It's why the story is named as it is.

I cry each time I reread this story, which is silly, I know, because I created it, but it's the truth. Kyle's pain is so raw and numbing. In particular, I tend to tear up a bit around where Kyle finds out Lance has cancer. My mother has cancer, and hid it from me from two months, so it hits close to home. I remember feeling a plethora of emotions when I first found out, the foremost two being fear and betrayal. But I recovered from my hurt quickly, because I knew she was just afraid to tell me. I had quite a lot on my plate at the moment without the fear and stress that cancer brings.

I didn't intend to publish this story at first, but after mentioning the idea on a whim and receiving encouragement from my best friend and seeing other friends enjoy Lance and Kyle's story, I decided that I would publish it after all. Well, that's all I really have to say. If you've read all this, then thank you very much! I hope Lance and Kyle touched your hearts as much as they did mine.

P.S in another life, they're happily married with a couple pet birds. Kyle learned how to sew just to add extra pockets to all of Lance's clothes, they watch the sun rise every morning and Lance makes Kyle toast every morning because Kyle only eats toast for breakfast and they go to karaoke every Saturday night, just the two of them, every week, without fail. My best friend refuses to accept anything but this as truth, so I suppose it's law now.