The car is running because the heat is broken at the house and I needed somewhere warm to finish this. That is the reason I am giving myself. The real reason is that if I go inside I will have to talk to people, and if I talk to people I will not finish this, and if I do not finish this I will stand up in forty minutes and say whatever falls out of my mouth, which is not what my mother asked for.

My mother asked for a eulogy.

I have a draft on the passenger seat. I have been working on it for nine days. I have been working on it, truthfully, for a month, which is how long it has been since the phone call, and the phone call is the part that is not in the draft, and I am the only person who knows this.

Michael fell. That is the official version. Michael fell from the balcony of his apartment on a Tuesday night, and the railing on that balcony had been bad for three years, and the landlord has a lawsuit pending from a previous tenant, and my mother has decided, with the full force of the woman she is, that this was a tragic accident involving a landlord who will pay. I have not argued with her. I have not argued with her because I do not know, for certain, that she is wrong. I know what I think. What I think is not a certainty. What I think is a shape I have been carrying around for a month, and I have not put it down, and I have not shown it to anyone, and I am not going to show it to the three hundred people about to file into that building.

The first draft was angry. I threw it out.

The second draft was the one my mother would have written. I kept it for reference and wrote a third.

I should say, before I go further, that I write remarks for other people for a living. I run executive communications at a company you would recognize. I have written eulogies before. I have written them for CEOs to deliver at employees’ funerals, and for senators to deliver for constituents they had met once, and once, early in my career, for a man who needed to speak at his own wife’s service and could not find the words himself. I wrote that one in two hours. It made him cry when he read it. He delivered it the next day and thanked me at the reception, and I shook his hand, and I went home and had a drink and slept well.

I have spent twenty-three years learning how to build the kind of sentence a grieving person can say aloud without breaking. I know the rhythm of it. I know where to put the specific detail and where to put the general warmth and how to land on a note that lets the room exhale. I am, in a narrow and technical sense, very good at this.

That is why I have written six drafts of my brother’s eulogy, and none of them are true, and none of them will do.

The third is what I am working from now. It is mostly true. It has the camping trip in it, and the summer we built the treehouse, and the fact that Michael could make anyone laugh, which is the thing everyone who knew him will say today and which is also true. He tended bar at the same place on Westheimer for eleven years. Regulars came in to see him. He remembered their drinks and he remembered their kids’ names and he could throw out a problem customer without either of them being embarrassed about it afterward, which is a gift some people have and most do not. I have left out the parts that are not for the room. That is what a eulogy is. It is the public version of a life, arranged carefully, and the parts that are not for the room stay in the writer.

I am looking at the draft and the draft is fine. The draft is good. My mother will cry in the right places. My father has been dead six years, which is the only thing about today that is simple. The room will feel that Michael was loved. This is the job.

The problem is I keep reaching the last paragraph and stopping.

He called me on a Thursday.

It was late, which was not unusual. He called late often. He would work until ten and then want to talk, and I would be tired, and I would listen for fifteen minutes and then say I had to go, and he would say okay and we would hang up. This was our pattern. It had been our pattern for years. I thought it was working.

On the Thursday he called, he said he had been feeling off. That was the phrase he used. I have been feeling off, he said, the last few weeks. Maybe the last few months. He said it the way you say something when you have been rehearsing how to say it and you still cannot find the right words. He said it like he was trying it on.

I said, what kind of off.

He said, I do not know. Just off.

I said, are you sleeping.

He said, not really.

I said, you need to be sleeping. You cannot feel right if you are not sleeping. Have you tried going outside in the morning. Have you tried cutting coffee after two. Have you tried.

I kept listing things. I remember the list. I remember I was tired and I was proud of myself for the list, because it was a caring list, it was the kind of list you make when you are a good older brother on a phone call. I listed for maybe two minutes. He was quiet for most of it. When I stopped, he was quiet a little longer.

I know now what I should have done. I know it because I have spent my career teaching other people to do it. When someone says a sentence they have been rehearsing, you do not answer the sentence. You ask what is underneath it. You ask the question that makes space for the second sentence, the one they were working up the nerve to say. I have taught this in training sessions. I have marked it up in other people’s drafts. I did not do it for my brother. I answered the sentence he rehearsed and I never heard the one underneath.

Then he said, that’s not what I meant.

I said, okay, what do you mean.

He said, never mind. I will figure it out.

I said, call me tomorrow. Okay? Call me tomorrow and we will talk more.

He said yeah. He said it the way he said yeah when he meant no. He hung up.

He did not call tomorrow. He did not call the day after. I did not call him. I had meetings, I had my kids, I had the list I had already given him, and I thought the list was enough. I thought he would work through the list and feel better. That was what I thought.

He fell four weeks later. Or he did not fall. Or he did, and the railing was bad, and the timing of a bad railing and a bad night is a thing that happens sometimes. My mother is not wrong that it could have been an accident. She is not wrong that the landlord is liable either way. She is not wrong about any of the things she has decided.

I am sitting in the parking lot of a funeral home in a car with the heat on and I am trying to write the last paragraph of a eulogy, and the last paragraph is where the camping trip is supposed to go, and I am stuck on the camping trip, because the camping trip is the one I do not know what to do with.

We were nine and five. Our father took us to a state park in East Texas, the kind with concrete pads and a bathroom cinder block building and a dirt road with a speed limit nobody observed. Our father set up the tent. Our father drank four beers and fell asleep in the camp chair. We went into the tent when it got dark, which was around seven-thirty because it was late fall, and Michael was scared almost immediately.

He was scared because there was something going through the cooler outside.

I knew what it was. I had seen raccoons at the park in the daylight. I told him it was raccoons. He did not believe me. He said it was too big to be a raccoon, and it sounded like it had hands, and the hands were trying to get in. I said that was what raccoons were, little hands and a mean face, and he said that was worse.

I went outside with a flashlight. Our father did not wake up. I saw the raccoon. It was exactly as advertised, small and mean and extremely committed to the cooler. I came back into the tent and I told Michael it was just a raccoon, and I said, I’m right here. I said, I’m right here, go to sleep, I’ve got it.

He went to sleep.

For the next thirty years, when one of us was scared of something small, or when one of us was pretending to be scared of something small to make the other one laugh, or when one of us actually was scared and did not want to say so, we said raccoon. It was our word. It meant, the thing you are afraid of is smaller than you think. It meant, I will go out and check. It meant, go to sleep, I’ve got it.

On the Thursday he called me, he did not say raccoon. He said, I have been feeling off. He did not know how to say raccoon anymore, or he did not trust that I would hear it, or he had grown out of the word, or he had grown into something that did not have a word. I do not know which. I will never know which. I gave him a list of things to try instead of going outside with the flashlight. I gave him sleep hygiene. I gave him coffee advice. That is what I gave my brother on the last phone call I will ever have with him, and I have been sitting with that for a month, and I have put it into a eulogy draft six different ways and taken it out six different ways, because it is not for the room.

There are not words for it. I write words for a living and there are not words for it, or there are and I have not found them, or I have found them and I cannot put them in a speech my mother will hear. Any of those could be true. Probably all of them.

What is for the room is the raccoon.

I have the last paragraph now.

I am going to tell the story of the camping trip. I am going to tell it the way it was, mostly, with the beer edited out and the father edited gentler. I am going to say that Michael was afraid and I went outside and I told him it was just a raccoon, and that for the rest of our lives that was our word. The room will laugh in the soft way people laugh at funerals. My mother will press her fingers under her eyes. My aunt will nod.

And then I am going to say one more thing. I have not written it down. I do not need to write it down. I am going to look at the casket and I am going to say one word, and the room will hear it as the end of the story I just told, and the room will hear it as goodbye, and the room will be right, twice, in ways the room will never know.

I will be saying it to a phone call.

A woman in a dark coat just tapped on my window. She is mouthing that it is time. I am nodding. I am folding the draft and putting it in my jacket pocket. I am turning off the car.

Raccoon.

I am ready now.