Sung at Everybody's Funeral

Lyrics

[Intro]
(an organ, in the kind of room where you know what is happening)

[Verse 1]
She wrote it as a letter to a business partner. That is what it was.
A goodbye to a man she worked with, to explain why she had to go,
and to say that leaving was not the same thing as not loving,
which is a distinction people spend whole lives failing to make.

[Chorus]
And now it is sung at everybody's funeral. Everybody's.
In chapels and crematoria and community halls in countries she never visited,
by people who could not name the man she wrote it about,
for husbands and mothers and children and friends, for sixty years.

[Verse 2]
It has done more work than almost any song in the language.
It went to number one for her in 1974. Then number one for her again in 1982.
Then Whitney took it in 1992 and it went round the whole world twice,
and every one of those was somebody using it to say a thing they could not say.

[Chorus]
And now it is sung at everybody's funeral. And today it is sung at hers,
which she would have found funny, and did find funny, in advance —
she talked about her own funeral often and cheerfully and at length,
and said she wanted people to enjoy it, and said she would probably still be working.

[Bridge]
There is something almost unfair about writing the goodbye
that the whole world then borrows for sixty years,
and then arriving at your own and finding the words already worn smooth
by every mouth that ever needed them. She lent it out. It came back for her.

[Outro]
(the organ holds; the room sings the part she wrote)
She wrote it to leave a job.
It buried half a century of strangers.
Today it is hers again.