Remembering Pop

Eulogy writing is one of the stranger creative forms — you are making something in grief, for a live audience you cannot edit for, under a time constraint you did not choose. Tom White's piece is interesting as a companion to his 'A Glaring Problem' essay about his Tourette syndrome, because it reveals the other side of the register he works in: warmly personal, rooted in a specific Catholic New York family, and attentive to the small physical details that make a life feel real rather than summarised.nnThe first thing to notice about the eulogy itself is its structure. Rather than proceeding chronologically or thematically, it proceeds through character — building a portrait of a specific man from a sequence of small antics and large consistencies. Pop's faith was not abstract; it was the same thing he brought to a Yankee game and to a hospital bed. His humour was not separate from his generosity; the expired-license Lexus story ends with him simply driving home, the laws of old age and motor vehicles clearly insufficient to stop him. White renders his grandfather as someone whose life accumulated into a particular shape, and the shape is visible even in a short text.nnThe second and quieter move is the frame White wraps around the eulogy — the apology for being absent from his Substack, the gratitude for his readers' continued attention. This meta-layer is worth attending to. White is writing a grief piece, but he is also describing writing as a form of accountability that his readers hold over him, and grief as the thing that broke the rhythm and now has to be integrated. The eulogy is the content; the framing is the essay about why anyone keeps writing after loss.nnWe picked this because it is one of the better eulogies to circulate on the internet in recent years, and because the meta-frame around it raises a question worth sitting with: what does it mean to keep making things for strangers when the things that matter most are private? The question the piece doesn't answer is whether Pop would have understood the Substack.