Grief, Autogenerated

A made-up eulogy, a real AI platform, and the edits we don't always get to make.

I came across a site recently: EulogyLab.

Its tagline? Create Meaningful Eulogies & Obituaries in Minutes.

One line read: Complete your eulogy in just 5.5 minutes with our caring, step-by-step process.

As if grief should run on a timer.

The strange part? I’d already written it—with a red pen.

Because grief, like editing, is more about what we cut than what we say.

Ctrl+Z for the Afterlife

Iris Cole edited eulogies.

Not because she believed in legacy. She didn’t.
But someone had to remove the ellipses from other people’s grief.

The job found her after Uncle Ray’s funeral.
Afterwards, she rewrote his tribute on a napkin.
One line read: He was alive… until he wasn’t. Let’s move on.

Her version circulated. Then came the emails.

She worked alone.
Mornings began with weak coffee and drafts full of vague praise and borrowed adjectives.
Her edits were spare—precise.

One Thursday, a file arrived. No subject line.
Attachment: Iris Memorial Draft.

She opened it. Her name stared back in past tense.

Iris was quirky and usually on time. She enjoyed puzzles, soft lighting, and her cat.

Was.

Semicolon, her cat, knocked a pen off the desk. Protest or agreement—unclear.

She read on. The tribute sounded like it had been written for a polite houseplant.

She touched many lives.

Needs evidence. Touched how?

She will be missed by all.

Quantify. Who is “all”?

Her famous tuna casserole was always the hit of the party.

Never owned a can opener.

Iris loved her morning runs. She was always humming in the shower.

Absolutely not.

The page was red. Crossed lines.
Margins crowded with ink and second thoughts.

The next morning, her inbox lit up.

Subject: Re: You Made My Mom’s Funeral Weird (In a Good Way)

Saw your markup on Reddit. The ‘houseplant’ line? Iconic. Can you do mine next?

She searched.

There it was—her eulogy, redlined and reposted, captioned:
Woman Edits Her Own Eulogy Like a Savage

Thousands of comments.

Give her a Netflix deal.
Iris, please narrate my death.

BuzzFeed. A podcast. Even a funeral home.
Everyone wanted a piece of her un-death.

She hesitated.
Then said yes.

A week later, she stood in a spotlight at TEDxMidtown.
She adjusted the mic, eyes scanning the crowd like punctuation in motion.

The slide behind her:
Editing from Beyond: Fix Your Eulogy Before Someone Else Does.

“I’m Iris Cole,” she said.
“Editor. Still alive, despite reports.”

Laughter.

Slide two: her viral eulogy.

“Someone once wrote I usually showed up on time.
That’s not a eulogy. That’s a performance review.”

More laughter.

She clicked through her rules:

• Write your own.

• Be specific.

• Avoid “nice.” That’s for muffins.

• Tell the weird truth.

• End on something unfinished, if it’s honest.

Final slide: a stone mock-up.

Iris Cole
Trouble Starter.
Probably Still Editing This.

Applause. Real. Strange.

Back home, her inbox was full.

Subject: Grandma was a menace in pearls. Help?

She opened a new document:
Eulogy – Nana, Pearled & Dangerous.docx

She didn’t start fights. But she ended them—with a deviled egg and something sharp to say.

Semicolon slept on a pile of sympathy cards.
One paw tucked under.

One card said she was “gentle.”
She crossed out everything else.
That word, though—she left it alone.

Her hand hovered over the pen.
Not to edit—just to hold it.
For once, she didn’t have a note.

The cursor blinked. Waiting.
Its faint flicker cast a pulse of light on the red pen beside her keyboard.

She watched it.

Some words weren’t wrong.
They just needed room to breathe.
No ellipses. Just the pause where one might’ve gone.

What unsettled me most about EulogyLab wasn’t the tech—it was the tone.

The pastels. The serifs. The ease of saying goodbye in less than 600 words.

Iris never got around to finishing hers.
She just started.

Grief doesn’t resolve in clean sentences.
It lingers in the margins, between drafts, in the places we meant to revise but didn’t.

This isn’t an argument.
Just what’s left when the editing stops.