Eulogy

First of all I would like to offer my deepest sympathies to ______ and ______. One of the bittersweet ironies I suppose of any close-knit family is the anguish and pain, disorientation and despair even, delivered whenever a family member passes away. The very thing which hurts is the very thing which tells us how much we loved a person. _____ was the second of ____ and ____ ____'s six children. She had four sisters and one brother, and it is on her family's behalf I speak. But what should I speak of? Is it _____ as a girl triumphantly leading over one hundred ____ ____ down a crowded village street? Is it her poignant success in bringing the family together at her and _____'s wedding? Or her loyalty, frankness, dignity, and giggles (not least, I am reliably informed, in church)? Is it her cutting off her thick pigtails, aged three or four, and flushing them down the lavatory out of sheer devilment? Is it ___, _____, _____, pigtails intact again, leaving __ ____ ____ together for __ _____ in _______? Or, later, _____'s visits to our grandmother's hotel by an inky-blue sea when, if memory serves me right, she would walk along the seafront, sometimes with ______, _____ and myself, and buy us all an ice cream? Later still, is it _____'s quiet pride at gaining a degree? How about the homemaking skills, extended to occasional guests such as myself, with echoes of one's own childhood - the carved wooden elephants and model rigged ships - all around? Or her devotion - returned in kind - to _____ and ______? Or should instead I speak of her keenness to read and to keep up to date with fashion, a love of shoes and handbags, not only when as a child she famously refused to take off her ______ hat when going to sleep, but, also, very nearly right up to the end, when with _____ she sat watching TV talking about fashion? When word first began to seep through of the severity of _____'s illness, we elected to have a small family gathering - just the six siblings - in a beautiful setting outside ___. _____, we will always remember, looked remarkable. In fact, she was positively glowing. Her blue-grey hair chimed with the ________ blue of her eyes. Inevitably, different memories were shared - I can remember for example _____ talking to ____ about the daily taxi and bus ride they would share to the _____ ______ in ____ after the family moved to _________ - and, all the while, of course, we raged against the prospect of her death, Dylan Thomas's "dying of the light". But, and here's the thing, we never really know someone. Not as well as we would like to think. I believe it is the thought of _____'s courage as she prepared to go over the top - the first of the six - which tells me most about her. As _____ knows, as _____ knows, as _____'s sisters and indeed brother knows, ____ was a loving wife, mother, and sister. We miss her badly already. I have just been to _____ again. I think she liked that. Nor was she one to shirk the idea of national responsibilities. Anyway, it was while in _____ this last trip that I received a text from my wife ______, telling me ____ had been returned home from hospital. I remember reading this over and over as a military _____ helicopter struggled to land, and a collection of dust and scraps of paper blew into the air. I was in a ___ ___ base - ____ _____ - and, no matter the protection, no matter the fact I was, among others, with ___ _____ _______ __ _____ that particular day, nothing could make me feel safe from thinking the worst. Which was why I was so determined to return to see ______ one last time. As it happened, she passed away within perhaps minutes of my landing, and it was too late. We all want to be happy and we are all going to die. Our grandmother had a solution. It was a phrase. 'To live in the hearts of those you love is not to die,' it read. Well, on behalf of _______ and _______, myself, ______'s four remaining sisters, ___, ____, _______, _______, their husbands, my wife, ______ in a church at this very moment in ______, our cousins, sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, grandchildren, and good friends, I would like to propose to the House - for life and death is to some of us still a long and furious debate - that ______, sturdy, trenchant, loyal, courageous, beautiful ______, by living as she does in the hearts of those she loved, will not die.