My father is seventy-three. He is not dying yet, in the medical sense. He is dying in the slow ambient sense in which all our parents are dying once they pass a certain age — the sense in which time has turned its weight slightly in their direction, and you can hear, on the phone, that he is sometimes a little out of breath now, and his sentences are sometimes a little shorter than they used to be, and his interest in arguments has, mercifully, shrunk.
I am writing this eulogy in April 2026, in advance, because I have come to believe that a son who waits to write his father's eulogy until his father is dead writes a worse eulogy. The good eulogies, the ones I have heard read at funerals that did not collapse into clichés, were written, I am sure of this now, by people who had been writing them in their heads for years. The drafting was the relationship. The funeral was just the moment when the draft, finally, had to stop.
I do not know when my father will die. I would like, before that day, to have the eulogy mostly drafted. So that what I read on the day, when I cannot trust my voice to make decisions, is not the panicked product of forty-eight hours but the long product of a slowly tended honesty.
This is the first draft. It is, at this point, the only draft. It will, I am sure, change. He may live another fifteen years. The draft will deepen. Some of these sentences will, I hope, get better.
I am sharing it now because I think other sons might want a model — not of the eulogy itself, but of the practice of drafting it while the man is still alive.
For my father, Mordecai Goldstein. Whenever the day comes.
My father was a difficult man.
I want to start there because I do not believe in eulogies that begin with my father was a kind man when the man in question was not, primarily, kind. My father was many things. Kind was on the list, intermittently. Difficult was on the list, every day, for everyone who lived with him. I am not going to spend this eulogy pretending the difficulty was not there. The difficulty is part of what we are burying. We are burying the whole man, not the edited version.
He was difficult in the specific way that men of his generation, raised by Holocaust survivors in a small Chicago apartment, were difficult. He was suspicious of joy. He was vigilant about money. He believed, deeply, that the world was about to take from us what little we had, and he carried that vigilance into rooms where it did not belong — birthday parties, vacations, my bar mitzvah, my wedding. He was the man at the back of every celebration, scanning the exits. He did not know how to put the vigilance down. I do not, in retrospect, think anyone ever told him he was allowed to.
He was also, on his good days, the most loyal man I have ever known. He drove me to college, eight hours each way, in a snowstorm, and unloaded my dorm room without complaint, and slept on the floor next to my bed because the hotels were full, and did not mention it for the next twenty years. He sat with my mother every day for the eleven months she was dying. He did not miss a day. He read to her, in a voice he did not have the ear to know was beautiful. He was, in those months, the version of himself that I think had been trying, his whole life, to come out, and that the difficulty had kept underground.
I want to say this: I am not sure I forgive my father.
I am also not sure I need to.
The forgiveness frame, applied to my father, makes the relationship smaller than it actually was. Some of what he did, I do not need to forgive — it was love, expressed in the only vocabulary he had, and I have no business holding him to a vocabulary he did not have access to. Some of what he did, I am still working out. Some of it, I will probably never resolve. He was not a clean man. Eulogies that pretend their subject was clean are eulogies that are more about the speaker's discomfort than about the dead.
I am not going to deliver one of those today.
What I want to tell you about my father is the small things. Eulogies that work, in my experience, are made of small things. The big things take care of themselves. The big things are in the obituary. The small things are in this room.
The small thing about my father: he hummed in the kitchen.
He hummed when he made coffee. He hummed when he washed dishes. He hummed a particular Yiddish lullaby that his own mother had hummed to him, in the apartment on Albany Street, in 1953, before he had any idea what the words meant. The words, I learned later, are about a goat. The lullaby is sadder than I have any right to know. He hummed it for forty years, in our kitchen, every single morning. I did not know, until I was thirty, that he was carrying his mother into our house with the lullaby. I do not know if he knew either. I think he did. I think it was the one piece of tenderness from his own childhood that he had managed to bring across the bridge, and he hummed it because, in that small daily way, he was bringing his mother to breakfast with us.
I did not appreciate the humming until I was in my thirties. I now miss it, on the days I am not in his house, with a sharpness that surprises me.
The other small thing: he kept every birthday card I ever sent him. He kept them in a filing cabinet in the basement, organized by year. I found them, by accident, in 2019, when we were cleaning the basement. He had not told me. He was, in fact, embarrassed when I found them. He said, in a small voice that I have not heard him use about anything else, they're nice cards.
The man who could not, in person, tell me he was proud of me had been keeping forty-three birthday cards in a filing cabinet, in chronological order, like a record of a love he was unable to articulate but could not let go.
I want this said at his funeral. I want every person in the room to know about the filing cabinet. I want them to understand that some men's love takes a different filing system than the one we are trained to recognize.
Here is what I want to say to him, while he is still alive, that I am writing into this draft so that I will have already said it on paper before I have to say it out loud.
Dad. I do not know if you will hear this in a hospital bed, or if it will be read for you at a funeral. I am writing it now, in 2026, while you are still well enough to argue with me about politics on the phone. I am writing it because I want you to know, before either version of this happens, what I am going to say.
You were a difficult man. You know this. We have, in the last five years, talked about it more than we did in the previous thirty-nine, and you have, with surprising grace for someone who did not get the manual, listened. I am proud of you for the listening. I am — and I will say this even though it will, when read aloud, be almost too much for the room — proud of you, full stop. The difficulty was not the whole of you. The humming was you. The filing cabinet was you. The eleven months at my mother's bedside was you. The eight-hour drive in the snowstorm was you.
I do not forgive you for everything. I do not need to. I see you accurately, which is, I have come to believe, what fathers of difficult men actually want from their sons — not absolution, but accurate sight. You raised me to be the kind of man who would tell the truth about you in your eulogy. That is, in some strange way, the proof that you raised me well.
I love you. I have said this to you in the last two years. You have, twice, said it back. The third time, if it comes, I will not let you off the hook. I will say it first. You are allowed to keep humming after.
I will miss the humming. I will miss the difficulty. I will miss the man.
I am, in writing this in advance, practicing for the day. I do not know if the practice will help. I suspect it will. The practice is the relationship. The eulogy was always going to be the relationship. I am just doing the relationship out loud, while you are still here to read it.
If you want to draft your own father's eulogy in advance, the journal prompts tool has a section for exactly this. The slow weight you may be feeling is named anticipatory grief, and our grief timeline tool maps what tends to come next. If your father is approaching the end and you want a script for the harder conversations, our scripts for talking to your dad about end of life were written for this.