Poem for mums eulogy

[Borntobeamum]

My DH is doing the eulogy for my lovely mum who passed away at the age of 90.

Can anyone suggest something beautiful and fitting please?

Many thanks x x

You can shed tears that she is gone

Or you can smile because she has lived.

You can close your eyes and pray that she’ll come back

Or you can open your eyes and see all that she has left.

Your heart can be empty because you can’t see her

Or you can be full of the love you shared

You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday

Or you can be happy for tomorrow, because of yesterday

You can remember her and only that she’s gone

Or you can cherish her memory and let it live on

You can cry and close your mind, be empty and turn your back

Or you can do what she’d want: smile, open your eyes, love and go on

We had the one mentioned above that ends smile, open your eyes, love and go on for my Mum's funeral. I also took great comfort from this one which I read on the first anniversary of her death. Possibly more about grieving itself.

When Great Trees Fall
Maya Angelou
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

Gosh, that is beautiful

Cover me over, clover Richard Eberhart

Cover me over, clover.
Cover me over, grass.
The mellow day is over
And there is night to pass.

Green arms about my head
Green fingers on my hands.
Earth has no quieter bed
In all her quiet lands.

this Is a short but very beautiful poem, I want it at my own funeral. Sorry to those of you who are grieving.

Death Makes a Crown of Love by Greg Gilbert

Death makes a crown of love,
A mantle to take across the threshold
As a sign of accomplished living:
You are loved,
You have loved,
You have lived.

I’m very sorry for your loss. I lost my father last year & it’s a little easier every day, but only just. It’s not a poem, but I’ll leave this here for anyone who may not be into more traditional faith based writing.

The Physicist’s Eulogy by Aaron Freeman.

“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the Principle of Conservation of Energy, so that they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the First Law of Thermodynamics: that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every joule of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this universe. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid the energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

“And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your broken-hearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair — those hundreds of trillions of particles — have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your spouse rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let him know that the photons that bounced from you and that were gathered in the particle detectors that are his eyes, that those photons have created within his brain constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

“And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as she says it. And she will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

“And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope that your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they will be comforted to know that your energy is still around.

“Because, according to both the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, not one bit of you is gone: you’re just less orderly.”

I'm sorry for your loss.

I read this at my lovely mum's funeral. For me it says it all.

Late Fragment by Raymond Carver.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

I also read How do I love thee by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

DH had this for MIL:

Your Mother Is Always With You
By Deborah Culver
She’s the whisper of the leaves as you walk down the street.
She’s the smell of certain foods you remember, flowers you pick, the fragrance of life itself.
She’s the cool hand on your brow when you’re not feeling well.
She’s your breath in the air on a cold winters’ day.
She is the sound of the rain that lulls you to sleep, the colors of a rainbow.
She is Christmas morning.
Your mother lives inside your laughter.
She’s the place you come from, your first home.
She’s the map you follow with every step you take.
She’s your first love, your first friend, even your first enemy.
But nothing on Earth can separate you.
Not time.
Not space.
Not even death.

''The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang — home-going. So the snow-flowers go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock-ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil. Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death’s arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit — waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at its own heaven-dealt destiny. All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried. Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life’s feast — all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our brothers and they enjoy life as we do, share heaven’s blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity. 'Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.“

Not a poem, obviously, but the naturalist John Muir. We read it at my beloved Dad's funeral.

I read this at my daughters funeral last December.

“Farewell, Sweet Dust” by Elinor Wylie
Now we have lost you, we must scatter
All of you on the air henceforth;
Not that to me it can ever matter
But it’s only fair to the rest of the earth.
Now especially, when it is winter
And the sun’s not as bright as it was,
Who wouldn’t be glad to find a splinter
That once was you in the frozen grass?
Snowflakes, too, will be softer feathered,
Clouds, perhaps, will be whiter plumed;
Rain, whose brilliance you caught and gathered,
Purer silver has resumed.
Farewell, sweet dust; I never was a miser:
Once, for a moment, you were mine:
Now you are gone, I am none the wiser
But the Autumn leaves are as bright as wine.

We had “Sea Canes” at my Mum’s funeral, which was apt as so many of her friends had died.

@bereftmother That is so beautiful and I’m so sorry for the loss of your beloved daughter.

An extract from The Velveteen Rabbit
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
“The Boy’s Uncle made me Real,” he said. “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

We had this one at my mum's funeral:

When I am dead, my dearest
BY CHRISTINA ROSSETTII_

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

I love this verse, I'm sceptical about life after death, but I do so want this to be true..

People disappear, but they never really go away.

The spirits up there put the sun to bed, wake up the grass, and spin the earth in dizzy circles.

Sometimes you can see them dancing in a cloud during the daytime when they're supposed to be sleeping.

They paint the rainbows and also the sunsets and make waves splash and tug at the tide.

They toss shooting stars and listen to wishes.

And when they sing wind songs, they whisper to us "Don't miss me too much, the view is nice, and I'm doing just fine."