The phone is pressed to her ear, and she's been listening for twenty minutes before she says a single word about the man who died. She's a hospice chaplain in Durham, North Carolina, and the woman on the other end is the dead man's daughter. The chaplain has a notebook open, but she isn't writing yet. She's waiting for the daughter to stop telling her what kind of father he was — generous, devoted, a pillar of the community — and start telling her something real. And then it comes. The daughter laughs, a small wet laugh, and says, "He used to hide candy in the toolbox so Mom wouldn't find it." The pen finally moves.
That moment — the twenty silent minutes before the one true detail surfaces — is what this chapter is built around. Because the tribute you eventually stand up and deliver does not begin when you sit down to write it. It begins much earlier, with your ears, in conversations like that one. The best eulogies aren't composed. They're gathered. And gathering them well is a skill with a name and a method, which most people have never been taught.
Let's start with what listening actually is, because almost everyone overestimates how well they do it. The psychologists Carl Rogers and Richard Farson laid out the framework back in the 1950s, and it still holds. They called it active listening, and they said it has three parts. The first is listening for total meaning. When someone speaks, there are two layers running at once. There's the content — the actual words and facts. And there's the feeling underneath the content. The daughter's words were "he was generous." The feeling underneath was something more complicated, more tender, and it only surfaced when she relaxed enough to remember the candy. If you only catch the content, you walk away with a résumé. If you catch the feeling, you walk away with a person.
The second part Rogers and Farson named is responding to the feeling, not just the fact. When the daughter laughed about the toolbox, the wrong move would be to ask, "What brand of candy?" The right move is to stay with the warmth — to say something like, "It sounds like that was your private joke with him." That single reflection tells her she's been heard, and it does something practical too. It opens the door wider. People who feel believed keep talking. People who feel processed clam up.
And the third part is noting all the cues, the ones that never make it into words. A pause before a name. The voice that tightens on one memory and loosens on another. A sigh, a long silence, a sudden subject change. Simply Psychology, summarizing this research, points out that facial expression, posture, and tone carry the speaker's emotional state as clearly as the words do — sometimes more clearly. On the phone you lose the face, but you keep the breath and the timing. The grieving often tell you the most important thing right after they tell you they have nothing more to say.
Here's where most people go wrong, and it's worth naming before you make the same mistake. The instinct, when you sit down with a grieving relative, is to come armed with questions and to fill every silence. That instinct is exactly backwards. The oral historian Studs Terkel had a line that the writer Roman Krznaric quotes in his work on empathy. Terkel said, "Don't be an examiner, be the interested inquirer." An examiner is collecting answers. An inquirer is genuinely curious about the world inside another person's head — and the difference is audible. People can hear which one you are, and they give very different things to each.
That curiosity is the first of what Krznaric, in his Greater Good piece on the six habits of highly empathic people, calls the habits worth cultivating. He studied empathic personalities for a decade, and the first habit he names is curiosity about other people — a real hunger to understand a life unlike your own. The second is challenging your own assumptions, searching for what you share with someone rather than what divides you. Now, Krznaric was writing about empathy as a force in the wider world, not about interviewing the bereaved. But the habits map onto this work almost perfectly, so let's borrow them.
Take that second habit, challenging your assumptions, and apply it to a tribute. You think you knew your uncle. You're his nephew; of course you knew him. But the version of him you carry is the version he showed a nephew. His old fishing buddy carries a different man. His sister carries a third. The widow carries someone none of you ever met. If you write the eulogy from inside your own assumption — that your uncle was simply the man you knew — you'll miss most of him. The empathic move is to walk into each conversation assuming the other person holds a piece you don't have. That's not humility for its own sake. It's how you find the toolbox candy.
Krznaric's later habits sharpen the point. He talks about listening hard and opening up — that real empathy is a two-way street, where you're willing to be a little vulnerable yourself, not just mine the other person for material. When you're gathering memories of someone you also loved, this happens naturally if you let it. You say, "I keep getting stuck on the fact that I never told him." And the other person, hearing your honesty, gives you theirs. The conversation stops being an interview and becomes two people grieving together, which is exactly the soil where the best stories grow.
So how do you actually pull the specific memory out, instead of the wall of adjectives? The technique here is open-ended questions, and Simply Psychology lays out the mechanism plainly. A closed question — "Was he a good father?" — gets you a yes, and a yes gets you nothing. An open question — "What's a time he showed up for you when it counted?" — has no predetermined answer, so it forces the person to go find a real memory. Questions that begin with "what" and "how" pull the widest. "What did the house smell like when he cooked?" "How did he say goodbye on the phone?" You're not asking them to summarize a person. You're asking them to walk into a specific room and tell you what they see.
And then — this is the part people skip — you reflect it back. Paraphrasing, the research calls it. You say, in your own words, "So even when money was tight, he never let you feel it." Two things happen. One, you find out whether you actually understood, before you build a whole speech on a misunderstanding. Two, the person feels the closeness of being accurately heard, and that closeness makes them offer you more. There's a finding worth knowing here. When people receive an accurate paraphrase of what they've said, they rate the listener as more likable and feel closer to them. In plain terms: getting someone right is one of the warmest things you can do to them. It feels like being known.
There's a trap in all of this, and it's a quiet one. The trap is that while the other person is talking, you're already writing. You hear the toolbox candy and your mind leaps ahead — that's my opening, that's the line, I've got it. And the moment you do that, you stop listening. You've left the room. You're in the future, composing, and the next three things they say — which might have been better — sail right past you.
The cure is mindful presence, and a cardiologist named Jonathan Fisher describes it about as well as anyone. Writing for Mindful, Fisher says his most valuable clinical tool is the ability to maintain awareness through an entire interaction — because missing one detail a patient shares can mean the difference between trust and disconnection, between catching an illness and missing it. He offers three practices, and they transfer directly to the kitchen table where you're collecting memories. Begin with intention — remind yourself, before you knock on the door, why you're really here. Not to extract quotes. To give this grieving person space to share what matters most. Be here now — feel your own body, your feet on the floor, your breath, so you're anchored in the room and not in your head. And keep returning. Fisher's honest about this: the mind wanders, that's its nature. When you notice you've drifted off into composing, you gently bring yourself back. Repeat as needed. Nobody stays present for an hour straight. The work is the returning.
If someone stopped you right here and asked what the single biggest threat to a good interview is, what would you say? It isn't asking the wrong question. It's listening while secretly drafting. The story you most need is almost always the one that comes after you thought you had enough.
Now, the deepest move in this chapter, and the one most worth sitting with. Letting other people's stories shape the truth you tell. There's a real tension here, and serious people land on different sides of it. One school says the eulogy is yours — your relationship, your voice, your grief, and you should write the person as you knew them, full stop. Anything else is ventriloquism. The other school says you're a steward of a shared memory, and your job is to gather the room's truth, not just broadcast your own. The research on tributes and ritual leans toward the second view, and so does the toolbox chaplain, and here's why the case is stronger.
Recall the daughter who started with "generous, devoted, pillar of the community." If the chaplain had taken that at face value and written it up, she'd have produced a tribute the daughter could have copied off a sympathy card. It would have honored no one, because it could have been about anyone. The actual man — the one who hid candy in a toolbox, a little mischievous, a little sweet, slightly afraid of his own wife's disapproval — only emerged because someone listened past the headline. The truth you tell at the podium should be shaped by what you heard, not just by what you walked in already believing. Sometimes what you hear will contradict your version, and that contradiction is a gift. It means the person was bigger than your view of them.
This connects to what Chip and Dan Heath, the brothers who wrote The Power of Moments, found about why certain experiences lodge in memory and others evaporate. They point out that we feel most alive precisely when things aren't certain — when there's a surprise, a turn, something we didn't expect. A tribute assembled from many people's memories has more of those turns in it, because no single person's view of someone is surprising to themselves. The surprise lives in the seams between perspectives. The fishing buddy's version of your uncle will startle you, and that startle is exactly the texture that makes a room lean in.
So strip this chapter down to what's doing the real work. A tribute is researched before it's written, and the research is listening. You listen for the feeling under the words, not just the words. You come as an inquirer, not an examiner, asking open questions and reflecting back what you hear so the person feels known enough to go deeper. You stay present instead of drafting in your head, and when you drift, you return. And you let what you actually hear reshape what you thought you knew — because the person was always more than your single view of them.
Here's the line to carry out of this chapter: the candy in the toolbox is worth more than every adjective in the sympathy card, and you will only ever find it by listening longer than feels comfortable. The eloquence everyone panics about lives in the silence before someone laughs and tells you the true thing.
Which raises a harder question, the one that haunts every honest tribute. Once you've heard the true thing — the candy, the mischief, the small human flaw — do you dare to say it out loud, in a room full of people braced to hear only sainthood?