No Eulogies Please; or What Amelia Earhart Might Think on the Occasion of her own memorial service

So I will now return to my regularly scheduled broadcast. My novel begins with Muriel Morrissey in mourning. My novel ends . . . well let's just say with liberation. For her. And for Amelia. Since the loss of my mother I've been writing her eulogy. And of course because I'm a novelist, I got to write Amelia's, at least the one I thought her sister might give under the circumstances. I also got to put in Amelia's reaction to it. So what would it be like to hear your own eulogy? I don't think we often get to, unless we're characters in movies where for some reason there's been a terrible mix up and we show up at our own wake, or memorial service. And that just doesn't seem to happen all that much in real life, of course, tell me if I'm wrong on this one.

Amelia is pleasantly surprised, after all she's spent the novel wondering what on earth her sister will say. She's been more than a little surprised at what the rest of the world has been saying. For Amelia finds that in her absence there's been plenty of supposition without substantiation. Was she a spy? Was she captured and shot? Did she survive or die, plunging into the ocean? Was she a good enough pilot? Was her death her own fault? She finds all of this irritating to the extreme. But also comical. How could everyone get it so wrong? Because we all love a narrative, that's who we are. We're only human.

And eulogies are all about point of view. The one I'm writing will be different from the ones my siblings give. Writing mine for my own mother I focus on the personal, because that's what I most enjoy hearing. I want to know who that person was and what they did, what made them tick. I want to take scenes from their life away with me. That's what Muriel does for Amelia. And I suppose that because she was such a public figure the rest of the world got to do the same.