1.Get in the car
Friendship with Alex meant late-night drives and a person who could tell you weren't okay before you'd said a word. His family knew one side of him. I want to share the friend the rest of us got to keep.
We met at nineteen, working the closing shift at a restaurant that no longer exists, and the first thing he ever said to me was, "You're doing the mop wrong." He was right. He was right about the mop for the next twenty-two years. He was also the person who, when I was twenty-four and had made a mess of my life that I won't describe, showed up at my door at midnight with a bag of gas station food and said, "Get in the car." We drove for four hours. He didn't ask what had happened until somewhere in the third hour, and by then I could say it.
That was Alex's gift. He knew that some things can only be said sideways, in the dark, at seventy miles an hour. He built his whole friendship on it.
He wasn't easy. He was late to everything, including his own surprise party, and he argued with waiters about things that didn't matter. He owed me forty dollars from 2011 and he knew it and he'd bring it up himself, every time, and then not pay it. I would give a great deal right now to be owed that forty dollars for another twenty years.
What he did for me he did for everyone here. I've heard the stories this week. The drive to the airport nobody else could make. The phone that got answered at three in the morning without a hello, just "What's wrong?" He had a way of making you feel like the only person he'd ever driven anywhere, and it turns out he was driving all of us.
I don't have a lesson. Alex would have hated a lesson. What I have is a habit I picked up from him, which is that when somebody I love goes quiet, I don't ask what's wrong. I ask whether they want to go for a drive.
Alex, I'm doing the mop right. I've still got your forty dollars. Get in the car.
Why this one works
- The first line the friend ever said ("you're doing the mop wrong") becomes the last line of the eulogy, which gives the room somewhere to land.
- The forty dollars is a joke that turns into grief inside one sentence, which is how grief actually arrives.
- The speaker refuses to draw a lesson and offers a habit instead, which keeps the ending from sounding like a sermon.
- Other people's stories are summarised in two lines, so the speech represents the room without becoming a list.