Things I Never Said at Her Funeral

Things I Never Said at Her Funeral

I stood in front of the casket and told everyone she loved to garden.

That wasn’t a lie.

She did.

She used to wake up before the sun just to talk to her roses. Said they bloomed better when they were spoken to gently. She never spoke to me like that, though.

That’s the first thing I never said.

People in pews nodded as I read the eulogy I’d typed up the night before, emotionless and clean. I said she was strong. Said she had a “quiet grace.” Said her absence would leave a hole no one could fill.

I didn’t say she left that hole long before her body did.

I didn’t say that she hadn’t called me in three years, or that our last conversation ended with me hanging up before she could.

I didn’t say she forgot my birthday four years in a row. That the only gifts I got from her as an adult were accidental: voicemail silence, half-written letters in an email draft folder, and that one Christmas card she sent to my old address.

I didn’t say I was angry.

Not the loud kind of anger. Not the kind that kicks over chairs or screams at strangers.

The slow kind.

The kind that rusts you from the inside out.

The kind that makes your voice shake even when you’re smiling.

I didn’t say I hated how much I missed her, even when I didn’t like her.

How confusing it is to grieve someone you also resented.

How I spent years trying to become the kind of son she’d be proud of, and how I never knew if I got there because she stopped showing up to tell me.

I didn’t say I wished she’d told me the truth about Dad.

Not the watered-down version she gave when I was twelve.

Not the vague mentions of “bad decisions” and “he wasn’t ready.”

But the real truth.

Whatever it was.

I didn’t say she once told me she loved me in the middle of a fight,

and it was the only time I believed her—because she didn’t say it to end the argument.

She said it like it hurt.

I didn’t say I was scared.

Scared that I’ll become like her.

Cold in the name of strength.

Distant in the name of boundaries.

Full of love I can’t seem to give in the right direction.

I didn’t say she smelled like chamomile and cigarette smoke.

That she hummed when she cooked but never remembered the lyrics to songs.

I didn’t say she once held me so tight during a thunderstorm I thought the house could fall and I’d still be safe.

I didn’t say she taught me how to write. How to survive. How to be alone without being lonely.

I didn’t say she tried.

I didn’t say I noticed.

Instead, I said she was “complicated.”

The kind of word you use when the truth doesn’t belong in a church full of polite strangers.

I said she “lived a full life.”

What does that mean?

She died at 61.

Alone, in a hospice bed, with the TV playing a rerun she didn’t recognize.

I wasn’t there.

The nurse told me she went peacefully.

I said thank you.

I didn’t ask what her last words were.

I didn’t want to know they weren’t my name.

I didn’t say that I forgive her.

Not fully.

Not yet.

But I’m trying.

I’m trying to hold both truths at once:

That she hurt me.

And that she loved me, in her own broken way.

I didn’t say any of this at her funeral.

I wore a black suit. I smiled at her sisters. I shook hands with people who said, “You have her eyes.”

And when it was over, I sat in my car with the windows up, gripping the steering wheel like it could anchor me to a version of myself that didn’t feel hollow.

If I could go back—if I could stand there again with the mic in my hand and silence all around me—I wouldn’t talk about her garden.

I’d talk about her laugh.

About the way she cried during sad commercials.

About the time she sat on the floor with me when I failed my first college exam and said, “Maybe this is where you begin.”

I’d talk about how we never said goodbye properly.

How I spent more time practicing her eulogy than I ever spent trying to fix what was broken between us.

I’d talk about how love, in families like ours, is never simple.

But it’s real.

Even when it doesn’t sound like “I love you.”

Even when it sounds like silence.

💬 Closing Thought:

Grief is never tidy.

It doesn’t wait for perfect endings or clean resolutions.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can say is what you never had the courage to say when it mattered most.