I Thought I'd Given My Mom A Good Eulogy. Years Later, A Phone Call Made Me Question Everything.

The most biting piece of writing criticism I ever received came from my little sister. She’d been packing up her apartment in New York City when she discovered a copy of the eulogy I’d given for my mother 11 years earlier, when I was 25.

She called me, flustered. It was 2013 and I’d recently given up my career as a corporate lawyer to attend graduate school for creative writing. In my new life, classmates and I crowded around a worn, wooden table, avoiding eye contact while giving feedback on one another’s stories. Because of this, I should have been prepared for whatever my sister had to say. But I wasn’t.

“You made Mom sound like a crazy person,” my sister told me.

I struggled to process her words. My beloved mother? Who I looked up to more than anyone?

While I couldn’t remember exactly what I said in the eulogy, I could still hear the mourners’ reactions as they streamed out of the synagogue.

“You really captured your mother,” one of her colleagues told me.

“You were so funny,” said a family friend.

These recollections made my sister’s criticism these years later all the more confusing.

My mother’s eulogy was the first one I’d ever written, and I didn’t have much time to prepare because Jewish funerals are held within 24 hours of death. In my childhood bedroom, still covered in the purple wallpaper I’d once begged my mother to buy for me, I had called up a life’s worth of details.

My mother had two master’s degrees. She added the syllable “er” to words like soda and took it off words like drawer, a product of her Bronx upbringing. She had received her first cancer diagnosis at 26, a second at 33 and a third at 50.

The list went on: She wore Uggs before they were cool. She loved bread with olive oil and anchovies on