The Eulogy

My father-in-law is dying. His condition is terminal and there is nothing that can be done for him. It is just a matter of time, but he is a stubborn man and he is fighting to hang on as long as possible. I don’t blame him. I know I’m in no hurry to pass on and I hope I will fight to live when it is my time.

As of this writing, he is very grumpy and impatient, bordering on abusive towards my wife and her brother. I walked out on him tonight as I was getting upset at the way he was speaking to us. Honestly, I don’t want to come back to his house, but my wife is one of his primary caregivers and she needs to spend quite a bit of time there, including overnight sometimes. I was planning to stay tonight, but the way he was talking to us…I’m going home.

So, to the title of this blog. The Eulogy.

My brother-in-law will deliver the eulogy at the funeral. He has been struggling to think of what to say so I decided to take a pass at writing it. I spent some time with my father-in-law listening to his stories again…for the umpteenth time just so I could collect some background information for the eulogy. I got some gems from him about how he met his wife, his time in the National Guard, how he was the student body president in college, his life in Peru and Bolivia when he was young, his business ventures, and more.

So, now I just had to assemble the details into coherent thoughts that could be presented at the funeral. I put together a eulogy that honors him and his accomplishments. It is a beautiful piece of writing. But, I cheated. I didn’t write it myself. I fed the details into ChatGPT and what it produced was brilliant. Simply brilliant.

I gave it to my brother-in-law. He is going to take it and make corrections to some of the names/dates/places that I got wrong, but I’m convinced the vast majority of the eulogy he delivers will be ChatGPT generated. It’s not like it’s a scholarly document that needed to be peer-reviewed. What’s the harm in using a tool to help write something beautiful. None that I can see…at least for now.