Exits: To keep on living

In winning it all the Boston Celtics banish their own eulogizing.

I wrote two eulogies in one day.

For one, I’d had a few conversations about the person — Jerry West — with people who knew him, less in a chronological sense, less the A to B to C accomplishments in a life, than in the side-by-side understanding of one. To know someone, to share conversations, to see them, maybe work alongside them, for stretches of days, weeks, months, then to have them go away from you and come back, go away and come back.

For the other, I fact checked against my own memory to my mom. It was for my opa, a man I’d only ever called ‘Fred’. Who, as I learned for the first time at his funeral, wasn’t even his first name. It was a shorthand of one of his middle names — Friebert — and one he adopted when he arrived to Canada an immigrant.

Eulogizing, it’s a strange thing to admit to enjoy. Mostly because the prerequisite is for someone to die, and if you’re eulogizing, then it’s likely someone beloved to you, or to a world you orbit. Enjoy is the wrong word, but I’m not sur…