Woman sheds light on the harsh reality of older women receiving depressing eulogies

Funeral speeches often expose how little someone's family or friends might have known the deceased person while they were alive. Seems like it happens mostly at the funerals of older ladies whose loved ones knew them only through the sacrifices they made for the family and nothing else. This harsh reality was pointed out by TikToker @katharinaasiena in a viral video with the text overlay: "When he tells you his mother is his female role model because she suffered her whole life, never did anything for herself, and basically sacrificed herself for the family because that’s what women do."

Kathie shakes her head despising the thought and captions the video with a warning to fellow women, urging them to run from men who think like that. A feminist author based in New York, Jessica Valenti (@auntiekilljoy) recorded her reaction to Katie's clip. Valenti starts by saying how older women are often considered selfless family caretakers only and their individuality is not recognized once they pass away.

A set of problematic expectations are often placed on women across the world with society expecting them to continue sacrificing for their families and give up on their own dreams and ambitions. Valenti spoke about how "sad truths are often exposed while people delivery their eulogies at women's funerals."

"The eulogy is like, you can basically like you can copy and paste them. They are all so similar. She was completely selfless. She devoted herself entirely to her family or to her husband and her kids and she never did a thing for herself, it was always about her family," Valenti explains.

The author considers them rather depressing than heartwarming or inspiring. "It’s really then that you realize how little people know the women in their lives," she adds. "They don’t know them as full human beings and only know them in terms of what they can do for them." Several fellow TikTok users showed up in the comments section to agree with Valenti, sharing how some of them have also known such women who were not known as anything beyond their family's caretaker.

@sapphic.witchcraft wrote: "This has changed me today. I want my daughter to know me as a full person so she knows she can be both a mum and her wonderful self." @thenadinelouise shared a story that read: "At a neighbor's funeral, the male family member doing the eulogy kept repeating 'she was a good girl' like she was a dog and not an 80-year-old woman."

@livnatlovato remarked: "A lot of people don't even notice how much work was being done for them until the women in their life die." @kempstirred added: "Literally had to rewrite by grandmothers obituary after my uncle wrote a piece of prose that was he was in WWII and she was at home waiting."

According to a report from The Mom Project, about 43% of highly skilled women leave their professional lives after becoming mothers. When it comes to the difficult art of balancing parenthood and careers, most mothers sacrifice their careers in order to raise their children. Netizens mostly agreed that this promotes an unhealthy narrative of how women must keep their individuality aside after becoming a mother or getting married to focus on taking care of the household only and it's a narrative that needs to change.