A Eulogy of Two Personae

I need to write and publish this. I've thought and thought how I am to do it without offending the people within but I've decided I'll just write it. This is my pensieve, after all, and this event has been bugging me for awhile now.

Larry's uncle passed away at the ripe old age of 90 some months back. We were visiting one of his daughters in hospital when we heard. This was to be Joyce's second last hospital stay. Her youngest sister Pearl was with her and told us the news of her father's demise.

As she leaked tears and sniffled, she was also smiling and putting on a brave cheery front. The father's passing wasn't a shock. He had lived a long life, he had been failing for the past few months, they had just had a nice 90th birthday party for him couple of months prior, one day after the wedding of a granddaughter. All his favorite daughters had returned to the coop from far points around the globe. They had decked him out in some cool threads. They had taken some great pictures. Tears are for their mother who will be all alone now.

And then Pearl said, "The wake and the funeral will be joyful affairs. After all, my father was such a cheerful man."

I continued patting her shoulder and rubbing her back for awhile, glad she couldn't see my face. Because I had this gobsmacked look of total surprise on my face. I took a peek at my husband, and then at my father-in-law whose elder brother we were talking about. Being true party mascots they both managed to look suitably sober to Pearl's declaration about her father.

The Uncle Liang that I knew since I married into the family was anything but cheerful, jolly or fun. The stories repeated at length about him by various members and branches of the extended family showed a stiff, proud, prejudiced, biased man. His siblings - my father-in-law and two other younger sisters tell and retell high tales of his peccadiloes. Their nickname for him is "High Com", as in High Commissioner. One or two of the cousins lament the favoritism he practised on his children. Daughters 1, 5 and 3 are his favorites. Daughter 4 is tolerated. Daughter 2 is ignored and Only Son is estranged and banned from his house and I never saw him or his two sons until the funeral.

I chalked up Pearl's effusive not-quite-true-at-least-to-the-rest-of-us sentiment about her father to her cheerful always-positive nature.

But at the wake that night, a grandson stood up and delivered a eulogy that repeated Pearl's take and that was at odds with how everybody else remembered him. I was looking around at the faces of the mourners and visitors and noted their looks of "Eh? Am I at the right wake? Are we talking about the same person?" Especially heart-rending was the expressions on the other grandchildren - the offsprings of the not-favored children. "My memories of my grandfather wasn't like that, yet we're talking about the same man."

A man lived two lives and died. To his wife, he was the best husband a woman could ask for. To half his children, he was the most wonderful father and to their children, the perfect grandfather - generous, full of laughs and jokes, an inspiration. Aside from this handful of people, to everyone else, to his brother and sisters, to his nephews and nieces, to his neighbors, to his colleagues and acquaintances, to the other half of his children and four other grandchildren, he was his public persona. The eulogy spoken at his funeral wasn't a lie, was told with heartfelt truth and tears, but it didn't sound true to the listeners.

I have been depressed by this for awhile now. I have discussed it with one or two people but was still dissatisfied. I can't even find the moral of the story behind it to sufficiently soothe the turmoil within. Now if the guy was an all-round curmudgeon and somebody stood up to give a false eulogy, I would just have a laugh over it and dismiss it from my mind. But after spending time digging around in the mode of Investigative Reporter, I am convinced it was the truth. He was truly a great man to a select group of people and an all-out curmudgeon to everybody else.

I think part of my unease might be contributed to the fear that at my funeral, the glowing eulogy spoken by my friends and acquaintance might sound false to my immediate family members.