At eleven on a Tuesday night, you are trying to find an adjective for your father.
*Devoted* is already on the page. So are *generous* and *much loved*. They sit there with the smooth, indestructible finish of hotel furniture. They would suit almost anyone. Yours had a way of holding a torch between his teeth while looking for something under the sink. Yours believed that arriving six minutes early amounted to being late. None of this seems to fit after the words *We gather here today*.
You delete *devoted*. Then you put it back.
The difficulty is partly literary. A eulogy has to be spoken aloud, in front of people whose attention is doing unusual things. But there is another difficulty beneath the sentences: the suspicion that sentences themselves are an evasion. He was here. Now there will be words about him. The exchange feels obscene.
There is an old Zen saying that appears to understand this perfectly: a painted rice cake cannot satisfy hunger. You can admire the brushwork, analyze the composition, write a dissertation on the historical development of rice cakes. Your stomach remains unimpressed. The saying lends itself to a certain brisk spiritual authority. Enough books. Enough explanations. Get to the actual thing.
Dōgen, the thirteenth-century Japanese Zen teacher, refuses to leave it there. In his essay [*Gabyō*](https://wwzc.org/gabyo-painted-rice-cakes/), he takes up the saying and objects to the familiar conclusion that studying Buddhist texts is therefore useless. Dismissing the teachings as mere representations, he argues, is a serious misunderstanding. Then he makes the metaphor considerably harder to manage.
A cake can be painted with rice flour. Mountains can be painted with mountains. The world itself belongs to the painting. By the essay’s end, in [Kazuaki Tanahashi and Dan Welch’s translation](https://hyanniszendo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/painting_rice_cake.pdf), he writes: “there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake.”
He has widened painting until it includes the making of the cake, the materials, the person who will eat it. Rice flour has entered an argument about representation. I hear a challenge here to the idea of an original reality waiting behind its expressions, available once we scrape them away. Even the apparently solid cake takes shape through a world of relations. There is no view from which it can be held entirely apart.
One way to approach his reversal is to notice how quickly we use the word *mere*. Mere words. Mere images. Mere ritual. The word places a small pane of glass between us and whatever follows it. Somewhere beyond the glass, we imagine, reality is happening without assistance. We would like to get there.
At your desk, this becomes the wish to write a eulogy so exact that it abolishes the need for a eulogy. The right words would bring him into the room. Anything less feels like failure.
A painted rice cake cannot do that kind of work. Neither can the unpainted cake. Even when your father was alive, no afternoon with him contained the whole of him. There was always another memory belonging to someone else, another thing you would learn too late. His presence never depended on your possessing a complete account.
Yet death makes incompleteness newly accusatory. The story about the torch leaves out his tenderness. The account of his tenderness leaves out the years when tenderness was difficult. You become anxious about the version of him you are making. Everyone in the chapel will leave with it. He will have no opportunity to correct you.
That anxiety deserves respect. Language can flatter the dead and bully the living. A family can spend decades being instructed to remember a person who bears little resemblance to the one they knew. The fact that words belong to reality gives us more reason to care which words we choose. They have consequences among the people who remain.
But accuracy also has its own temptation: the fantasy that enough qualifications will finally produce the man. You could speak for six hours. You could include every contradiction. Somewhere in the seventh hour, someone would still remember something you had missed.
Perhaps the task can become smaller.
There was an evening when the electricity failed and he searched for the fuse box with the torch in his mouth. Every time he tried to explain what you should do, the light swung wildly around the cupboard. You were both laughing too much to be useful. For years afterward, he maintained that you had been the problem.
Writing this down changes the room you are sitting in. You stop inspecting the adjectives. You remember how cold the kitchen tiles were through your socks.
Here the painted cake begins to matter. These sentences have brought something into the present that silence, on this particular Tuesday, had not brought. Your sister reads them on her phone and sends back a correction: it was the back hall. You argue briefly. Then she remembers the smell of the candle wax.
Already the memory is moving between people. Each adds something; each has to make room. The account acquires the awkwardness of a shared life. You had imagined yourself alone with the responsibility of getting him right. Now she is there, remembering differently.
At the funeral, you will still be speaking to an absence. There is no clever treatment of language that removes that fact. The room will contain his friends, a glass of water, someone trying to open a packet of tissues quietly. The words will take a little time. People will hear them differently.
You reach the part about the torch. Your sister laughs before anyone else does, and the laugh unsettles you because it sounds so ordinary. For a moment you hear the kind of interruption she might have made across a dinner table while he was still alive.
You lose your place. She is looking at you. You find the next line, and read it. When you sit down, she moves her bag so there is room beside her.