Redefining Our Relationship with Death and that Forgotten Uncle: How Eulogies are only More Depressing Fan Service

A normal attaché of funeral proceedings and rites for the deceased, eulogies are a performative genre; their success indicative by the reactions gained from the audience observing such a spectacle. It would be preferable to follow a scheme that satisfies the prospectors engaging with the medium, seeking satisfaction through this form that is supposed to provide a sense of release for those who relay the personal insights to their relationship with the deceased. But there is a line to be crossed when considering the audience and their degree of vulnerability, emotional fatigue, liberation of free thought and authentic knowledge regarding the deceased that promotes a certain form of eulogy as “desirable” or “necessary”. Humor can be an alleviating factor to emotional trauma. Emotional divulging can be therapeutic in releasing pent-up tension and aggression towards the subject. But these intense feelings would fall outside of the “speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly, typically someone who has just died.” This degree of separation with the experience of some whose relationship was tumultuous, a credible and noteworthy recall to their memories with those who passed is damning and retroactive to their reality, or authentic experience. Proposing that these reflections of the dead serve as a mode of interpretation for the regressive identity Western ideology holds with death, eulogies serves only as generalized character stats of constitution, dexterity and valor; a perversion of elegy that focuses on the agency and authenticity of the speaker. To analyze the “performance” of eulogies, I will focus on the influences of socioreligious ideals of agency, audience and authority that culminates into the bleak and life-sucking ectoplasm that reverberates throughout the chamber hall of a wake. It’s the “traditional” structure of eulogies and the existence of slight deviations from the archetype that will reveal the influence of societal pressures through what “should” be one form, but “could” perform more effectively in another.