“Don’t swallow your teeth”: the sin of defining others by what they do for you

In My Humble Opinion
1

Okay, this topic may be too complicated to limit to a poll question, at least for me, so I’m expanding it here.

I came across this thread on Tumblr, and it stuck with me for various reasons. It’s a Twitter thread about the writer becoming emotional at a funeral for someone she didn’t know…but not for the reason you might think.

The way the writer describes it, the eulogies were all about how the speakers benefited from this woman. Her husband described his life before he met her. Her pastor and kids talked about how “kind and helpful” she was, and how devoted she was to family and church.

And the writer found this horrible and tragic for this woman! In the writer’s view, she’d learned nothing about the dead woman or her personality or hopes or dreams, just that she “made herself small” and “swallowed her teeth” in service to others. The writer urges her readers to speak up, to complain, to assert loudly that your needs and desires matter too, so that you are seen as a person and your loved ones don’t spend your entire funeral talking about themselves.

I’m not entirely sure why this shook me. Maybe it’s because my own parents are getting up in years, and that gets me thinking about how I’d eulogize them. Would I have thought to eulogize them in a way that acknowledges their humanity? Would I have even considered this? What kind of person does that make me? Do I think of my parents as my servants and not as people, especially my mom?

This post was very popular on Tumblr, but obviously there wasn’t total agreement with it. Some thought it distasteful for the writer to judge a grieving family she didn’t know. Obviously, we have only this one person’s perspective, but it struck an emotional chord for me.

Basically, I have a lot of thoughts running through my mind (which was probably detrimental to the poll I attempted): Did this woman, as the writer implies, waste her life, her genuine self beaten down and ignored in favor of societal gender roles? Did her family love her, or did they demonstrate at her funeral that they thought of her more as a beloved servant than a person? Or is the writer an asshole for judging these people she personally didn’t know? Or both?Whether she was or not, is her basic message for women a valid one? Should I be rethinking how I view my mom? And I never heard of “swallowing your teeth”; is it an actual phrase somewhere, or was the writer mixing up different phrases?

So yeah. It’s a lot. Any thoughts out in Doperland?

2

There’s no way to know, since none of us know the family. And everything else is filtered through the writer.

But I have no doubt that for a LOT of older women still alive, and ones who’ve already died in the last 30-40 years, that is exactly how most of their family viewed them through most of her life.

3

Unless a person talks a LOT about themselves, you may not know much about their inner dreams and desires, or their secret joys or turmoils, even if you are a close relative. Like it or not, people view the world and other people through their own lenses, and how it all relates to themselves.

Unless someone speaking at a funeral says something inappropriate, it is best not to judge. And it is a really crass move find fault with those who are mourning their loved ones.

Remember, the funeral is not for the dead. It is for the bereaved.

4

There’s no way of knowing. And I’d argue the poster didn’t know either. At my uncle’s funeral his friends raved about how helpful and useful he was.

My grandpa (his Dad) later commented as an aside to me, “Who were they talking about?”

My uncle was, to the vast majority of his family members, a raging asshole. His reasons for his behavior were complex, and I’m very sorry he’s dead, but I’m not gonna sugar coat it.

So I’d take it all with a grain of salt. When someone dies, people want to focus on their most positive and altruistic qualities.

I think the gender roles interpretation is a possibility, but some people love being the helper, so we don’t even know if she was unhappy in that role.

I’m not terribly moved by the poster’s lecture, but I can see how some people would be. I just don’t know how convinced I am that modern women as a collective need to be told to complain more. US culture is pretty heavily skewed toward complaining as social bonding. Do we really need to be told not to be doormats? In 2025?

I can’t help but think about my Mom reading this and having it reinforce her delusions about being slighted and victimized when she does nothing for no-one and owes everyone an apology. This kind is stuff is catnip for narcissists. I’m not saying only narcissists will like it, just that they are always latching onto evidence that they are underappreciated.

5

TBH, I find that “speaker-centered eulogy” style, which I too strongly dislike, to be very common among amateur eulogists saying a few words about their dear departed at a funeral or memorial service, irrespective of who the departed is. I don’t think it’s so much about the decedent’s gender as about the fact that a whole lot of people don’t really know how to talk about anything but themselves and their own viewpoint.

Whenever I hear a eulogy speaker beginning their remarks with “The first time I met So-and-so”, I mentally roll my eyes, because I know it’s going to be another of those damn how-this-person-changed-MY-life speeches.

When I’ve had the sad duty of speaking at funerals and memorials, I always make sure that I start out talking directly about the deceased, without filtering it through my specific experiences and feelings. I know that bereaved people are understandably pretty focused on their own feelings and how the loss of the departed is impacting them personally, but folks, you gotta find something else to say.

Otherwise you just end up with what the OP describes, a procession of bereaved friends and relatives talking primarily about themselves and secondarily about the deceased. And yeah, it tends to come across as pretty self-centered and a bit dismissive of the person that you’re supposedly mourning.

6

I like speaker-centered eulogies, so long as they also tell me about the deceased. “I was unhappy until i met Bob, but then Bob did A & B & C, and that changed me in the following way” is just fine. It tells me both about Bob and about his impact on the world. And funerals are for the living: i also want to know about the pain of the mourners, if that’s what they want to share.

I answered in the poll-discussion thread, but i think i should repeat my thoughts here.

I don’t think the writer is an asshole for having these thoughts, nor for posting about them (without identifying information) on Tumblr. If they said something like that at the funeral, then yes, of course they are an asshole. People say all sorts of dumb stuff when they mourn, and it’s right to support them anyway. But i don’t see any reason to believe they did so.

Also, the writer’s message resonated with me right now, and not in a gendered way. My husband was recently diagnosed with myeloma after months of pain. His doctors say his prospects are good, with regard to the cancer. But if he’d complained more about the back ache, it might have been diagnosed months ago, when it hadn’t yet eaten his ribs to the point where he’s broken 6 of them. His overall prognosis could have been much better. I can identify with getting upset at a funeral where the mourners only talked about how much the deceased gave, and said nothing about the deceased’s wants and goals and ambitions.

7

From my perspective, that’s not even possible.

8

Well okay, yeah, metaphysically speaking, anything I say must inevitably be filtered through my own experiences and feelings. But I don’t need to make that explicit when describing somebody else, so that it sounds like I’m more interested in talking about me than about them.

9

This thread reminds me of George Eliot’s quote from Middlemarch: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Also, how does the writer on Tumblr know that the deceased wouldn’t have said at someone else’s funeral how that person was “kind and helpful” to her? I think this world could use more kind and helpful people.

10

The author is picking an incredibly narrow lens through which to view this experience, and making their own assumptions and rules about what those who have experienced a loss should or should not do in a eulogy for their loved ones (and also maybe the assumption that no one would eulogize a man in this way, though that might be me forcing this post through my own narrow lens).

People are grieving and saying goodbye. Everyone is going to do that differently. Telling a story where a deceased mother’s children say “she was a loving mom” and your response is to think “no wonder she had a heart attack and died” says much more about you than it does about the presumed happiness of the deceased.

While the author may have been there at that funeral, they did not see or understand anything going on around them. They have no awareness about grief or the grieving. The funeral was a traumatic experience for them, and they have come to the conclusion that this room full of grieving people they did not know must not really have known the deceased, and that the deceased must have been suffering from a deep loneliness, which might have been the very thing that killed her.

We will never know, and there’s no way the author could know either. It’s like if I saw someone walking down the street in a sweater with raggedy cuffs, and then concluded that they were an out-of-work lighthouse keeper burdened with grief for being the last in the family to be able to carry on the legacy of lighthouse keeping, and after their wife died in childbirth he was never able to truly be happy.

Like, maybe… but there’s no reason to think that is more likely than any other fiction. This author made up a story about the deceased using the most inconsequential of details to give the fiction shape. And in this made-up story, the author cast every single one of the mourners as selfish parasites. This is a fantasy, not a reality.

Not an asshole, but clearly could use some help to understand the trauma they went through at the funeral.

Why? How do you view your mom now?

I reject the premise that remembrances about the care someone gave to us denies their humanity.

The function of a funeral is not to present a verbal biography of the deceased. It’s to allow us to wail and gnash (or not) in whatever way each of us need in response to our own loss. “I am sad because they made me feel loved and seen and now they’re gone” is not dehumanizing. It centers the inherent humanity of and connectedness between the deceased and the speaker, and mourning the end of that relationship is the main reason one is at a funeral in the first place. The tumblr author decries “I don’t even know if she was funny” as if that sort of detail is more important than “she fed me soup when I was sick”.

11

Yeah.We don’t have enough info to justify any deep reaction, but here are some shallow reactions.

It’s hard to find things to write about, and there can be temptation to exaggerate emotions — the same way Youtubers include thumbnails of themselves with mouths agape and their irises floating in white.

Excerpt from the OP’s link: “… I never met this lady. I sobbed. My husband thought I was going to join her in the ground when I bent down to give [my] rose and spoke to her. I told her I understood why her heart attacked her. (…) A dozen people said she was the best woman on earth and I hadn’t learned a thing about her personality except she made it small. (…) I don’t even know if she was funny.”

I’m not sure how that would work. “I loved my mom, but it was sad she no sense of humor.”

The film Remains of the Day (starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson) featured characters who sacrificed personal fulfillment for a life of subservience. It wore on me; “Eleanor Rigby” handled the theme —better— in two minutes.

It’s certainly possible to make speeches that focus excessively on the speaker rather than the supposed subject.

12

I’m really OK with it. I’ve had some reasonable personal accomplishments in my life, in my career etc., but I don’t fool myself that any of them will have a bigger effect after I’ve gone (or even be remembered at all for more than a few years, among the people I worked with directly) than the things I’ve done for other people (particularly my kids). I would be quite alright if my eulogies focused on what I’ve done for other people that is absolutely my legacy.

Unless you’ve won the nobel prize or something thats true for most people IMO

13

I can definitely see what the OP is complaining about, but part of the point of a funeral is also for each speaker to talk about what the dead person meant for them, because doing so also says a lot about the deceased. Otherwise, everyone would be parroting the same thing over and over again. Imagine if the deceased person were a great book writer. Then everyone would just say “He/she was a great writer, wrote like Hemingway…..”, the next speaker also says, “He/she was a great book writer….”

It makes sense to say “He/she meant so much to me because they once took care for me for a month when I was sick in the hospital….”

14

Penn Jillette has said something that has always remained with me. He said that when you eulogize someone (or publicly speak of them in some other context), what you should strive to do, and what almost all speakers fail to do, is to not make the speech about them (the speaker).

I know this doesn’t really address the main point of this discussion, but it made me think of it, and I think it’s a proper notion to spread.

mmm

15

Well, if my husband died I’m quite certain I’d be talking about how I felt about it. Mostly gratitude.

For clarity, gratitude that I got to spend as much time with him as I did. Gratitude that I made the excellent choice to have a son with him and that he was a better father than I even imagined.

Funerals aren’t really about the dead person. I wouldn’t even know how to talk about my husband without talking about his impact on me and other people. I don’t even know how to do that while he’s alive. He’s an extraordinary human being.

If that is wrong, I’m not even sure what the alternative would be.

16

I don’t agree with this platitude. Yes, a funeral is for the bereaved, It will hopefully comfort them, but I disagree that it’s only for them and not for the deceased as well. Ultimately a funeral is about the deceased and involves the body of the deceased. I think that in principle the deceased has the right to a funeral which will reflect respectfully on them, that will commemorate who they were when they were alive, and that will be organized according to their reasonable wishes while alive.

17

I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Every bereaved person can make a different observation about some lovable quality of the deceased, or some impressive thing that the deceased did, without making the conversation all about their own experiences and feelings.

I mean, if a funeral host wants the eulogists to be focusing their remarks on their own experiences and feelings rather than praising the deceased more directly, then sure, go for it. But personally, I agree with the observation of Penn Jillette as recounted by @Mean_Mr.Mustard , that the result unfortunately often tends to come across as though the eulogist is more interested in talking about themselves than in praising the beloved departed.

18

Cripes, the person who wrote that Tumblr Thread is pontificating to the moon and back about the crushed, enslaved, oppressed life this poor dead woman lived, and the author never even met the deceased person! The poster just assumes the woman was the soul of misery, apparently because the deceased’s loved ones didn’t focus on the eulogy subjects that the writer thought they should.

Were the loved ones supposed to provide a soaring, uplifting, inspiring homage that would justify their dear departed’s life and entertain the multitude at the funeral as well?

So the widower was something of a windbag? So what? Maybe the dead woman loved him anyway? Is that even remotely possible according to this piously weeping stranger? This writer that accuses mourners of self-centeredness is a self-indulgent moron.to the nth degree.

Look, Tumblr Poster. You didn’t even know the person that you’re spewing this faux-heartbreak on. Don’t assume facts not in evidence. You’re only casting projections of your own baggage onto people who don’t need your ridiculous accusations at this sad time.

I said in my earlier post that you should only judge a eulogy if someone says something inappropriate. Apparently, the only inappropriate thing was this poster’s Tumblr Thread.

If the poster had actually known the woman in question, I might feel a bit differently. But to blatantly assume selfish motives of bereaved people based on NO evidence except their own pained words drives me nuts.

19

I agree with you, but do we think that didn’t happen in this case?

20

Boy, I would love it if when I died people talked about the ways I’d touched their life. It’s nice to think that good memories of me and how I helped others would go on after I was gone. I mean, idk if people actually would say that about me! But that would be my ideal.