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Eulogies can be constructive, positive for mourners

by Roger Martin

The first full-length 9/11 movie is now being distributed. It's called "The Guys" and it tells the story of a New York journalist who helps a fire captain write eulogies.

Two University of Kansas assistant professors, Adrianne Kunkel and Michael Dennis, could have advised the scriptwriters.

The two are faculty members in the Department of Communications Studies, and they have dissected about 20 eulogies, many taken from the Internet, looking for the ideas and themes common to them.

They discuss the tactics used by eulogizers in the January issue of the journal Death Studies.

The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky would have understood immediately what Kunkel and Dennis take to be the most effective form of helping those in pain wring meaning from suffering.

Dostoevsky spent years in a Russian prison and then more in enforced military service, writing afterward that suffering is "the sole origin of consciousness."

He added, "It is also inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart."

To draw back from pain, as Dostoevsky did, and to view it from a wider perspective is "the most effective form of coping," write Kunkel and Dennis.

Several tactics fall under the general strategy of providing mourners with a fresh perspective.

Sometimes the eulogizers reference an afterlife. Sometimes they recollect experiences with the deceased as a way of shifting from the current loss to thanks for what was shared.

And sometimes eulogizers recite lessons and traits learned from the deceased.

In addition to helping mourners shift perspective, eulogizers also commonly confess their own feelings about the death and suggest actions that those in the audience can perform that will echo the dead person's goals and values.

The researchers scrutinized five of the 20 eulogies with special care. Three commemorated famous figures. Two were highly personal. One of those was a eulogy delivered by Kunkel's father for her grandmother. The other was delivered by Dennis on the occasion of his father's accidental death.

Kunkel says that the Dennis eulogy revealed an unseen side of his father and reframed his misfortune in a positive light.

Bob Dennis had been a college soccer star and a veterinarian. Called "Broadway Bob" by everyone, he was a big kidder, a counselor and, for some people, a father confessor.

But he sometimes confessed, too. He told his son, for example, what few others knew -- that he felt he had bad luck.

That would be hard to deny given the way Bob Dennis died.

He stopped his car to help someone who'd been hurt in an accident -- and was hit by a drunk driver.

Kunkel recalls how hard it was for Dennis to write the eulogy for the funeral.

"In a way," she says, "the research for this paper began because we were trying to take something good from the bad that had happened."

One of the mind's most spectacular powers is the ability to turn woe into wisdom.

Sometimes the result is a novel like Dostoevsky's "Brothers Karamazov." Sometimes it is an academic article on the eulogy.

Sometimes it is a few sentences shared from one's own experience with a person whose heart is breaking.