The most difficult thing about writing a eulogy is that you can’t find original words for love and death. It’s like how the first time you fall in love you realize that all the stupid songs on the radio really meant what they said and they weren’t just empty clichés. And it’s the same thing with death. People say that their heart sinks. And you think that’s just a cloying metaphor until you really grieve and you actually have this weird physical sensation that your heart is slightly lower down the left side of your ribcage than it used to be. And people say you lose your appetite, and you think that’s just a nice sentiment until you realize you’ve hardly eaten anything in several days and hadn’t noticed. And people say you go numb and you’re surprised when it’s actually like that—your whole body gets this weird tingly limpness like your tongue does when you accidentally lick the inside of a banana peel. And you really want to find some completely original words for the completely original life that you want to honor and it’s almost impossible, because they’ve all already been taken. And that’s what everybody said at the funeral home—that they just didn’t have the words. I gave a speech about Christopher to my public speaking class in 8th grade. It was our first assignment, and we were supposed to describe our hero. I talked about Christopher and the time he came from behind in the final leg of the final relay at the sectionals swim meet and Bethlehem won. I remember being really angry because everybody in the class had their own hero but nobody seemed to be taking the assignment too seriously. They clapped politely after each speech but didn’t actually idolize the heroes. And I wanted to make sure everybody realized that Christopher really was the hero, and that we were using the same words but the difference was that my words really meant what they said. I wanted the other middle schoolers to understand how important it was that Bethlehem’s long winning streak at sectionals not be broken, and that the gap that Christopher made up really was enormous. And I remember my angry frustration that my class didn’t really seem to feel it and I couldn’t really get the significance of that race through to people who weren’t there. It’s a kind of tragic irony that that was my first public speaking lesson. And I still don’t think I can get it through to people who weren’t there what it was like to have Christopher on top of my parents’ “nice little pile of kids.” And so I won’t try to say everything important about him—I just want to say a couple of things that are a little weird about Christopher’s death, because I think it’s the weird things that might really get through. The first is that, what people always say after the death of a young person is that it doesn’t make sense, that it just wasn’t fair, that it just doesn’t make sense. But the weird thing is that in a really terrible way Christopher’s death almost did make sense. Because it almost makes sense and it would almost be fair that before God sent your soul into your infant body He might pull you aside and say that you had two choices, and that He could either give you an ordinary regular life, or He could give you a life where you would be deliriously happy in childhood, and you would be the most popular kid and captain of the swim-team in high school, and you would be the hero for the whole team and win sectionals for them in the final leg of the final relay, and you would take the prettiest girl to prom, and be the best looking, most athletic, and most intellectually gifted senior and be sought by every university in the country, and then you could go off and be the coolest kid in the coolest fraternity at Cornell, and you would have such enormous physical talents that you would win triathlons and make the national team and earn a small contract as a professional athlete, and such marvelous beauty that people would ask you to model, but then instead you would choose a cool new job in New York and use your spectacular IQ to make millions of dollars for your company as a young star on Wall Street, and you would always date girls who should be on magazine covers and then one of them turned out to be just the perfect girl for you, and at 27 you would have this fast and expensive car that you loved to drive and a great new apartment, and everyone would envy your happiness, your looks, and your success. But then God tells you that the whole thing is that if you choose this life there is a trade-off and the trade-off is that when you’re 28 years old five different things go wrong at the same moment and you die. And when you think about it that way, Christopher’s death makes perfect sense because most people would be too scared to make that futures trade but maybe Christopher would, and that’s the life he had. And it makes more sense in retrospect because everybody had wondered for so long how it could be that one single person could have every single blessing. And probably when Chris was alive people were saying that it just wasn’t fair—it wasn’t fair that one kid always won and one kid always got to be the hero, and it didn’t make sense why he had it all. And maybe there’s some strange way in which that all makes a little more sense now. And the other strange way in which Christopher’s death almost makes sense is that it’s hard to imagine what Christopher would have been like as a fifty-year old, and it’s even hard to think of him at thirty-eight, and he could never be an old man. Because all those things that really made Christopher Christopher—that fantastic energy, the marvelous physicality, the boyish mischief, and the way he was like Peter Pan and hated all that adult phoniness and wanted to just keep having fun and being cool all the time—these things are essentially youthful. Christopher as Christopher was a young man. And that was actually unique to him. My brother Patrick is younger than Christopher, and Pat is athletic and healthy too, but somehow I can still imagine what he’ll be like as an old professor of Chemistry with wrinkles and a bad back. But a Christopher Shaffer with a bad back and wrinkles and an afternoon nap is just a contradiction. He was forever young. And that’s another weird way in which Christopher’s death almost makes sense—Christopher died way too young, but it’s really hard to imagine him ever being much older. And the only other thing I want to say about the death that is maybe a little different is that I hate the idea that grieving is supposed to heal your wounds, and that’s just what I don’t want to happen. When your brother dies, it’s like your left hand got caught in a fire, and you have some horrible wound, and you don’t want the wounds to close up and be forgotten, and so you take the nails on your right hand and you keep scratching away at the flesh and what you really want is to keep the wound raw and hurting and red so that people can see it and know about the fire. When people say that they want to heal their wounds I think what they really mean is that they want to keep their wounds open but they want to find some way to be happy anyways. And maybe the reason people get together at funerals like this is precisely because it hurts you and it opens your wounds and people want to hurt, and the best way to hurt is to look in the eyes of other people who were hurt by Christopher’s death. And I hope that people keep doing that and hurting. Because behind that there’s this kind of ecstasy where all the sad chemicals in your body have run out your eyes and down your cheeks, and you’re surrounded by people you love, and you look at all the people who came out to honor your own flesh and blood, and you feel like his death was the biggest event in all of upstate New York, and you feel proud of him and you want to brag about what a hero your big brother Christopher Fiess Shaffer was and is.