Sherry’s Voice: Eulogy For My Sister

Below is the eulogy I gave at her memorial on June 7, 2016, at Williamson Memorial Funeral Home in Franklin, Tennessee.

Sherry’s Voice

Let’s acknowledge it: for a force of nature like Sherry, it is very hard to accept the reality that she’s no longer with us. I don’t want to be in that reality. None of us do. Yet here we are. 

Words are my job now, I write every day, sometimes thousands of words. But I’ll tell you, it’s hard to find the words for this. So I’ll try to speak to the Sherry I knew, and hope that in the mess of what I say you find something familiar. 

Our grandpa Ben Huff had a phrase for men whom he admired or respected: “much of a man.” A man in full. Grandpa reserved the phrase for very few and he always said it with reverence.

My sister Sherry was much of a woman. I know she went through some very hard times. I saw her in the middle of some of those. A couple we went through together. But to me–and perhaps this was a youngest brother’s perspective set in stone from the cradle on–she was always much of a woman. Even when I knew she had hit rough patches and was struggling, I never doubted for a moment she’d make it through. This was my sister Sherry Huff, after all. Sweet, sensitive, creative, yes, but some steel in her spine, too. Being here today is a shock because I can’t believe she didn’t make it back.

When our brother David died in August, 2000, Sherry showed me how to try and get through a time like this. She was hurting just as bad as everyone else, perhaps even more, for they were ‘Irish twins’–siblings so close in age they could be mistaken for having been born at the same time. I saw her tears, yes. She didn’t try to hide them. Yet she set her jaw and carried us through it–carried me through, alongside her. Thinking back now, I believe I instinctively trusted that she would.

She’d always done that. When I could barely walk, she would take my hand and lead me through the woods. She’d lead me through the neighbors’ field where she, David, and Rhonda had already played years before I arrived. She’d sit me down in clover and weave crowns from it and put them on my unwilling head and take pictures of me then, sitting beside our old dog Bub. Sherry with a camera, even then. I can remember kind of dreading her and Rhonda pulling me away from whatever I thought I was doing to go outside, yet hoping they would.

I remember pestering her as we got older, wishing she still wanted to do those things more, but life went on. And that was okay, because Sherry was still always there.
After all, she’d been there when I was 7, leaning over me in the night as food poisoning tore me up inside, her face tight with worry. Sherry was there when I was 17. She bought me my first glass of wine and got me to tell her about the girls I loved. She was there when I was 33, leaning over me in her living room as I napped in a chair, as we prepared for David’s funeral. She was just there, beautiful and urgent in the way she loved her family. She was vibrant. To a little boy, she was magical. I believe I wasn’t the only one who ever felt that way in her presence.

But after we grow up we can forget that siblings are like the pieces in one of the crazy quilts my Granny Huff used to make: tightly threaded jagged parts that together form something warm and comforting.

Sherry would remind me, though, and she had a hilarious way of doing it. She’d text me crazy clown pictures. It started with Bozo the Clown, then Pennywise, then whatever else she could find to mess with me. Sherry and I shared a lot of traits. We were a lot alike, and she knew that better than I did. We made the same kinds of dark jokes and liked the same kinds of movies. We understood our family in a similar way. With family, she was my touchstone. If I didn’t understand someone’s actions, behavior, even wondered why they posted something on Facebook, I would text Sherry and we’d go back and forth, laughing at the craziness, in the end. Sherry always understood.

It’s easy at a time like this to be too sad for words. It’s easy to be angry, in 100 different ways. She was too young. She was too vital. She was too Sherry. But if Sherry and I shared another thing that’s become very important to me over time, we shared humor.

Sherry had a Twitter account and she knew I enjoyed that site. We even ended up sharing friends on Twitter, people from all over who had jobs like mine and found my sarcastic sister funny too.

I’ll admit, it’s probably going to be hard to look at her Twitter for a long time. She posted a lot of things that to me were the best about her. Photos of old barns and sunsets and of course of Odie. I’ll never see any of those without thinking of her. She would tweet at me, too. One of the last things she ever directed at me was a tweet she posted in January with an image of a shower head and the words, “Our ultimate goal is to make as many people as sad as possible when we die.” She added her own comment: “This is a true story.”

It was dark and very funny.

I want this to be organized and have a point and be good writing–or speaking, I guess–but you know, it’s a mess because this is hard. However, I can’t help but think Sherry would want me to close with something that’s almost as funny as it is sad. She’d want someone to smile and shake their heads.

After she’d gone into the ICU and it was clear even to me up Massachusetts that the situation was very bad, I realized I was a mess and needed to clean up. And maybe I needed to be alone, away from my wife and kids for a minute.

I got in the shower and within a few minutes I was crying. I hated being so far away, I wished I could be near her one more time. In the middle of this tornado of thoughts, a loud, forceful voice barreled through everything: “CRYING IN THE SHOWER, BABY BRO? REALLY? THAT’S SO CORNY!! COME ON!!” Followed by that big old laugh. Sherry, the Sherry I knew and loved beyond words, piping up in my head and smacking me out of it. I don’t mean it was actually her–it was a voice from how I knew her, and how I suspect many others did as well. And I tell you, I went from tears to laughing in a heartbeat. And I knew that Sherry would be glad I could do both.

Let’s remember the best of my beautiful, fiercely loving sister. Let’s remember how sweet and kind she was. Remember her magical eye for sunsets, for old barns, for the sky. And I have to believe she’d want every one of us to remember laughing with her. As with any other force of nature, like storms, you got it all with Sherry. That’s why it’s so hard to believe I’m having to say these things today.

She’s really not gone as long as any of us have a memory. Like me, you’re going to have moments, is my bet, when Sherry will pipe up inside your head, breaking you up, making you laugh, smacking you into your senses. Hold onto them as long as you can.

Sherry is a huge part of me. She helped make me who I am, in many ways. My second mama, a piece of my heart. Her voice is inside me, forever. It’s not enough, I want her here. But I will hold onto it for as long as I live.