I have presided at many funerals.  If I did not know the person, and that often is the case when someone had a very loose connection to the church, it was always a trick getting the eulogy right.  Most people who help you with a funeral want to put on a good public face.  So you get a catalogue of virtues, or just one or two lines:  “She loved to cook.” or “He was always a great host.”

Sometimes grief stops the flow of words: all of us are memorable but the memories don’t always rise to the surface.  Sometimes it’s a stretch to find good things to say.  Death doesn't always take away the hurt, although I always suggest to the living that those who have died have no unfinished business with them; they only have to come to terms with their own unfinished business with the person who has died.

That conversation may be public -- someone tells their story to others at the funeral.  Or private.  It may take place at the graveside when no one else is listening.

I have heard people eulogize someone who wronged them and told the people gathered at the service what that person really was like.

I have, based on limited knowledge, eulogised (said good words about) someone and then been approached afterwards to hear what the person really was like.  “She hated me for taking her daughter away, all through our marriage”, said one man of his deceased mother-in-law.  The community knew her as a generous and kind woman.  After the funeral he took me aside and in some sadness said “No matter how wonderfully I treated her daughter, I was always 'You son of a bitch.'”

Some of us pass judgement on others for what we have lived and how that did not square with our expectations.  There are too many stories about families who would not attend the funeral of a child who died of AIDS or who would lie about the cause of death.

I remember watching a woman in a palliative care unit clinging to life until she saw her youngest daughter.  She had more morphine in her than any of the medical staff could conceive of yet still she arched her back with only her head and heels touching the bed, so great was her pain, but she would not die until she saw her daughter.  But her daughter was the black sheep of the family and had wounded both her parents and all her siblings and they would not allow her in to see her mother.  One died in excruciating pain, the other still carries hers.