Interesting that writing the eulogy is occuring by someone not all that connected to the gentleman in question, rather before his death. that it provides an opportunity to express legitimate anger about the individual is probably healthy, but it should remain there, and not be memorialized in a theologic setting in front of a diversity of folks.

I was asked by my sister-in-law to eulogize my late brother following his suicide at the age of 49, after thirty years of spiralling drug and alchohol abuse. My brother had been the victim of sexual abuse in his childhood and had "mirrored" that activity, and sexually abused me and then later, his children....... I had, for decades, monitored my relationship with him out of a sense of my own boundaries, speaking with him, at most, once a month. Our lives took very different directions, and as we both aged, there was less and less to talk about. Yet, as it turned out, I was the one most well-equipped to speak to his life. That, in and of itself, was compellingly sad.... So I did, speaking to the positive memories of him that I had, speaking to the challenges that he had faced. The venalities of his behavior were the subject of great conversation - in the privacy of my extended family's home - when the time was right. The contrast, for me, of the full knowledge of my brother's malignant, other-destructive and self-destructive behaviors with the awareness that he was highly respected in his community (where his drinking and sexually abusive behaviors were entirely shrouded) was overwhelming as I (a Unitarian) stood in the pulpet of an evangelical Baptist congregation that fully packed a sanctuary high in the mountains of New Mexico...... ultimately, I "got to it" by speaking to what the best of my brother was, by speaking to what he had tried, on his best days to do...... and I saved the discussion of the raw complexities of who he was for appropriately private dialogue with my sister-in-law and my nieces and nephew. Following the service, the congregation lined up to thank me for so fully capturing the man they knew, and the minister pulled me aside and commented on how cogent my words had been........ Was this eulogy dishonist? I don't think so - was it partial in its coverage? Absolutely. Was it cathartic for others? I can assume, from the reaction, that it was. Was it cathartic, or helpful for me? In some odd ways, I made use of it.

Several years after my brother's suicide, my mother died. She was a brilliant physician, a raving alchoholic, dependant upon a variety of self-prescribed mood-altering scripts and, for the last fifteen years of her life, the victim of Alzheimer's, living in increasingly stringint nuursing home settings that I, as her guardian, selected. My relationship with her when I was an adult was distant by my self-protective choice; she had been a ruthlessly ineffective mother having both enabled the sexual abuse of others and perpetrated her own with me, and with her other son. When she died, her remains were interred with her husband's at a federal cemetary, with a military graveside ceremony at the time of interment. No one attended save those who participated in the military ritual. To me, it would have been far more dishonest to have cobbled up a reason to go, to be present at an artificial service ministered by someone who did not know her, than it was to simply do what was specifically necessary. There was, in fact, no one who could or would eulogize this woman's life; I had mourned the loss of this woman as a real mother long, long prior to the death of this woman. There were, with her, no good memories, no alleviating stories, no witticisms that would temper the harsh reality of a life utterly misdirected in personal terms. There was, for me, nothing at all to eulogize.

So LW has some choioces. The wry caustic humor may be of real benefit to LW's friend, and to that end, keeping up that sense of perspective may be very helpful as Dad dodders into new heights of dysfunction and challenge for caretaking. However, prepping the eology well prior to this guy's death seems a bit macabre if the exercise is taken seriously. And, in fact, the eulogy that LW may so wittily craft may never need be uttered to have served its real purpose for LW and LW's friend.....