Over the course of the last twelve years or so, I have come to write a number of obituaries and quite a few more eulogies--most of them delivered myself, some written for others to deliver, but all for people I deeply cared about. People I care about still.
So far, 2024 has been a season of loss for me and many others. I attended two funerals in a single afternoon one blustery day in early February: the first for the mother of a friend who lost an incredibly brave but mercifully short cancer battle, the second for a college classmate, JSU Marching Southerner alumnus, and beloved teacher at my children's middle school, who died unexpectedly from a heart condition. A few days later on Valentine's Day, I lost a close friend to a car accident. And, just last week at the end of March, my first cousin died unexpectedly at home. I was honored to be asked to deliver eulogies at two of the four funerals, but I can't say that it was easy. It never is.
The Greeks recognized a eulogy as an encomium given for one who is either living or dead, with an encomium defined as a "piece of speech or writing that praises someone highly." More simply put, "good words," as clarified by Reverend Anthony Cook, who so eloquently officiated our classmate and fellow bandmember Sherry Anderson Cunningham's memorial service in February.
Good words to honor someone dear, to bring them back, if only for a few moments, the way we remember them, the way we hope to remember them all the days of our lives.
It is a deeply held personal conviction of mine that people should speak on behalf of their dead. While the religious elements of a funeral or memorial service are important and comforting for the devout, with prayers, hymns, and reading of scripture, equally important for the bereaved can be "good words" spoken about those they love and have lost, especially if that loved one didn't have a personal relationship with a religious leader. My own grandmother hadn't attended the church she was a member of in over two decades at the time of her death, but she often talked about growing up in the Church of the Nazarene, and she frequently sang herself to sleep with Amazing Grace until I was a teenager. The pastor who officiated her funeral service didn't know that. The scripture he read instead was appropriately comforting--it gave her children and grandchildren something to revisit when looking for peace in the days to follow. I hope the essay I read about her hands did, too.
If given the opportunity to deliver words of praise and remembrance for a loved one who has passed, I hope you'll find the strength and courage to do it. As a matter of fact, maybe you shouldn't wait until they've passed--the Greeks didn't. I can say pretty confidently that most of the people I've eulogized left this world never knowing how special they were to me. Maybe I thought I had more time with them? Maybe I was too embarrassed to ever say to them in person how much they'd impacted my life?
My cousin Barry certainly didn't know how much I loved him. I never told him in life how important our relationship as children was to me, how closely I carried those memories in my heart. I left his parents home the day we learned of his passing consumed with memories and regret. Writing it all down was the only way I was finally able to sleep that night. Reading those words to our family and all those who gathered to say goodbye the following week was the closest I'll ever get to letting Barry hear just some of the good words I have to say about him, and I wish that weren't so.
I'm including Barry's eulogy here.
Barry was born December 28, 1969, the 4th wedding anniversary of his parents Linda and Larry Morris, and joining another Christmas Baby, his older brother Danny, born on Christmas Eve two years earlier.
Recently, while looking at a family portrait of the Morrises, taken in probably late 1978 or early 1979, when Danny and Barry were around nine and eleven, I was struck by how much Barry looked like my Aunt Linda at that age, if you replaced her jet-black hair for his tow-head blonde. While Barry was tall and lanky like the Morrises in stature, he favored our Clark family in other ways. I offer our shared, prominent chin cleft as Exhibit "A".
By all accounts, Barry was a sweet and sensitive little kid. By the time I was old enough to have many memories of him, he was approaching this teenaged years, but still kind to his little cousins. For most of our childhood, Aunt Linda and Uncle Larry had a swimming pool, and the first Spring day the temperature ever broke 80 degrees, my younger sister Stacey and I would start on Aunt Linda. "When can we swim, when can we swim, when can we swim?" we'd beg.
I remember one late spring when Uncle Larry was working long hours at Goodyear and Danny had his own summer job in town. Barry was probably around 14. When we started in, "When can we swim? When can we swim?" Aunt Linda said, "You'll have to wait for Barry--the pool has to be cleaned before we can open it."
So, then we started on Barry. When he finally gave in, Stacey and I sat perched on the deck watching Barry in cut-off jean shorts down inside the pool, standing in ankle deep muck while he scrubbed the liner, as if our laser-focused, beady little stares could somehow speed him along. It took him two or three days to open the pool, and each day Stacy and I would return to watch. I'm sure we annoyed the t-total crap out of him, but I don't remember Barry complaining too much. Even when he had to swim with us afterward and for the rest of the summer as our lifeguard.
There are many pictures of us together--Danny and Barry, Stacey and me--some of which you've probably seen scrolling on the televisions in the chapel today. In some of them, the boys are lifting us on and off their bikes, some are of us gathered around birthday cakes, some are of us playing in the grass or swimming. In all of them, Stacey and I are never far from the boys. It seems like because there were two of them and two of us, we paired up: one little girl for each bigger boy. We followed them around like little ducks, and they let us.
Growing up in Alexandria, Alabama, Barry was a cub scout, played baseball and basketball, and marched in the band. While any of us juggling multiple children in multiple activities can relate to the stress of balancing all that with work and home life, I would say that my Aunt Linda has always looked back on those years as some of the best of her life. She was always good at and enjoyed being the Den Mother, the game chauffeur, the PTA Mom, and Band Booster for her boys. She wanted them to be involved in whatever they wanted to pursue, and she was there, quite literally, along for the ride.
Because Danny and Barry were in band, Stacey and I followed them into band, and even though I would go on to march at the college level at Jacksonville State University, I still don't think I've ever heard anything as cool as Barry Morris on quads. That "clack, dunk-a-dunk, dunk-a-dunk, clack" cadence he would play for us as little kids thrilled our souls! Barry was nothing if not cool. He and his Senior prom date were the first formally dressed young couple Stacey and I ever saw in person--Barry in a tux and dark sunglasses, his date in layers of silk and lace. They were quintessentially 1980s, and they looked like movie stars! So, Barry was cool even before his blue, t-top Camaro and motorcycles, but boy was he even cooler with them.
Our shared grandmother, who we called Mamaw Rose, was exceptionally proud of all her grandchildren, and I'd often overhear her on the telephone exuding our various virtues to other relatives far and wide. "Danny is an artist," she'd say. "He has a degree in graphic design from the Art Institute of Atlanta." Then she'd go on to describe whatever the latest thing Danny had designed and produced for her on her mantle. More than one I heard her threaten a relentless telemarketer with her attorney grandson "Alvin Donald Scott, Jr., Esquire." (She liked to throw Donnie's name around a pretty good bit. He was her ace in the whole!) Anyway, the things she most often bragged on Barry about were how smart he was, how hard he'd worked to be so successful to afford the absolutely best toys. She talked about his sports car. She talked about his motorcycles. She talked about the other vehicles he suped-up and modified that she probably didn't fully understand. She talked about that blue Camaro so much to her sisters in Ohio that Barry was finally persuaded to drive it all the way up there for a great-uncle's funeral.
The story goes that after the funeral, Barry decided he would take our great-aunt Bonnie, who Stacey and I would finally learn to call Aunt Bonnie Flaig and not "Old Aunt Bonnie," home. It was long before the days of MapQuest or GPS, and Barry wasn't entirely sure how to get Aunt Bonnie Flaig home. "You just have to get her to the Big Chicken in Hamilton, and she can find her way home from there," Aunt Linda told him.
Barry described the following trip as a raucously good time for Aunt Bonnie Flaig, saying she'd even hung one of her legs out of the passenger side window, probably while he blared the L. L. Kool J and Two Live Crew music he often played back then. "So you got her home okay?" Aunt Linda asked for reassurance. "Well, I only got her to the Big Chicken--you said she could find her way home from there!" he answered.
There's also another story about Mamaw Rose convincing Barry to whirl her down Alabama Hwy 204 in a side car attached to one of his first motorcycles, and there should be pictures somewhere, but those details are fuzzy to me. I only remember Mamaw being addiment that she be provided a pair of googles to protect her eyes from the bugs, though we all suspected she just liked the way they looked.
In the waning days of Mamaw's life, as Aunt Linda, Aunt Bonnie (the young one), Danny, Stacey and I sat vigil for her, Barry wanted so much to be supportive of all of us, but he didn't really know what to do. Finally, one day, several days into what was truly a physically and emotionally exhausting experience, Barry showed up with a case of liquor--the good stuff--maybe even Crowne Royal, I can't remember--at Mamaw's front door. "I thought y'all could use a drink," he said. He wasn't wrong.
There were other times during my life that Barry did his best to be there for me, as well. When I was going through a divorce (my first one, for anyone keeping count), he showed up at my door unexpectedly during a particularly difficult time with some encouragement and a little tough love that helped to pull me through, while reminding me that I was, in part, suffering the consequences of my own choices. "You're gonna be okay. Now cut it out," he basically told me. I always loved him for that.
This "looking out for" wasn't something Barry reserved for just me and Stacey, by the way. He was especially close with his only Morris first-cousin Kim, who he thought of as more of a little sister, and because he and Kim were closer in age, they had a lot more fun. I've heard tales of some of their adventures, but even if I knew all the details, I probably wouldn't be able to tell them here. Barry loved Kim. He trusted her with parts of his life he didn't always share with the rest of us.
Barry also had a special relationship with his Morris grandparents, PawPaw Roy and MawMaw Say. Being with them at their farm in Webster's Chapel was something that Barry enjoyed most. Because, like many people in his family, including PawPaw Roy, Barry was a gifted storyteller, I remember family holidays on Aunt Linda and Uncle Larry's back porch listening to Roy and Barry tell farm stories. As a result, I remember thinking as a twelve-year-old girl that I probably knew a lot more than some of my peers about how to free a wayward calf from a tower of hay bales, or an irrigation trench, or a barbed wire fence. Most of Roy and Barry's stories involved cattle ending up in places they really ought not to have been.
The challenges of livestock farming were firmly in Barry's wheelhouse of knowledge, as were so many other things. He was incredibly smart. Like Uncle Larry and Danny, he could probably fix or make anything he set his mind to. I remember as he grew more into his teens, he stopped traveling with the rest of us sometimes on our summer treks to Florida and Ohio to stay home with Uncle Larry instead, to build something as a summer project. From go-carts to bulldozers, they were always building or rebuilding something. It was this closeness with his dad and all that time spent in his shop that eventually propelled Barry into his chosen career as a machinist.
Barry loved riding: from across the country to Daytona Beach, to his own backyard on Mount Cheaha. It was his passion! After every mishap or bike wreck, no matter how broken or battered, we all knew that as soon as he was well enough and the weather was fine, he would be back on his back. Sometimes even if the weather wasn't fine...or it wasn't even daylight...or he wasn't exactly well enough. After his stroke in 2023, it was when he'd be able to ride again that most occupied his thoughts. He worked hard to regain his mobility and had come so far.
As he grew into middle-age, Barry kept a small circle of friends. When not with them, he preferred time riding or alone in his shop. The last few years of societal turmoil affected the way he saw the world. He'd worried for a while about where we were headed. It weighed heavy on him. As an extended family, we saw him less and less, but when we did, he was always friendly, always kind. I will forever remember Barry as he was at twenty, though. Handsome, healthy, funny, and one of the coolest guys I, or our grandmother, ever knew.
