The Eulogy Dr. Karen Wyatt Never Got to Give Her Father
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Dr. Karen Wyatt has spent decades helping people face death with grace. She's a retired physician, a bestselling author, a speaker, and the host of End of Life University — one of the most respected voices in the death awareness movement. She has sat with the dying, supported the grieving, and guided thousands of people through some of the hardest moments of their lives.
And yet for years, she carried something unfinished.
Her father died suddenly, traumatically, by suicide. The shock was total. Her family was numb — just going through the motions. There was no eulogy. No moment to stand up and tell the stories only she knew. No chance to say, in front of the people who loved him, this is who my father was to me.
"I always felt like something was missing," Karen shared when we spoke on her podcast recently. "That I never got to tell that."
She carried those stories for decades. And then, before we recorded our conversation, she sat down with TreulogyAI — not to test a product, but to finally say something she'd been holding for a very long time.
What the blank page does to grieving people
Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough.
In the shortest, most intense window of your life — when you're drowning in grief, paperwork, phone calls, and decisions — someone hands you a blank page and asks you to write something beautiful. Something that honors a whole human life. Something worthy of being said out loud, in front of everyone who loved them.
It's one of the cruelest asks of the grieving experience.
I've thought about this a lot. When my father-in-law passed away, I remember thinking there has to be an easier way. Not easier in a corner-cutting sense — easier in the way that removes the logistics so you can focus on what actually matters: the stories, the love, the memories.
That's why I built TreulogyAI. Not to replace the words — you already have those. But to take the blank page away entirely.
"It was just stunningly beautiful, and it brought me to tears"
When Karen sat down with TreulogyAI, she typed in the stories she'd carried all her life. The ones she'd never had a chance to tell. The private moments between a daughter and her father that his friends might never have known about.
Simply writing the stories down was therapeutic, she told me. But what the AI generated from them — using only her words, woven together in an order she hadn't imagined — was something else entirely.
"What astounded me is that those are things I see clearly now. They were all there in the stories I wrote to the AI. It's the way the AI just put them together that made it so visible to me."
Near the end of our conversation, she offered to read a portion of it aloud. What followed was one of the most quietly powerful moments I've experienced since building this product.
"Dad had regrets. He had wounds that never closed. He gave compassion to others much more freely than he could give it to himself. I wish he could have seen himself through the eyes of the people who trusted him, the customers who kept coming back, the strangers who reached safety because of him, and the daughter who is still guided by what he taught her.
I wish he could have known that love does not always have to be spoken for it to be received.
I received it, Dad. I received it when you taught me to look carefully at a distant hillside until the shape of a deer came into view. I received it when you showed me how to wait beside a stream without becoming impatient. I received it in your honesty, in your work, and in the way you noticed people who were struggling. I received it in those early mornings when your face lit up because the mountains were waiting for us.
Even now, I can close my eyes and return to the campfire. Dad is there waiting for the right moment to begin. We grow quiet because Dad has decided to tell a story. Before long, we're laughing, and then comes the lesson tucked gently inside the ending. The fire burns low. The mountains stand around us in the darkness, and Dad's voice is still there, teaching me how to pay attention."
I didn't know Karen's father. I had never heard those stories before. And yet I was there at that campfire. I was watching for the deer on the hillside. That is what a great eulogy does — it makes a stranger feel like they've lost someone they loved.
Karen's response when she finished reading?
"It's like looking in a mirror and having the mirror show you something that you couldn't see before."
This isn't a chatbot. It's a closed conversation.
One thing Karen and I talked about at length is the concern many people have about AI and eulogies. It's a fair concern — we've all seen generic, hollow AI writing that could belong to anyone.
TreulogyAI works differently, and Karen put it better than I ever have:
"The AI plays a surprisingly small role."
What she means is this: TreulogyAI is a guided conversation. You answer questions. You tell stories — small ones, specific ones, the inside jokes and Saturday morning rituals and things that made that person them. TreulogyAI collects everything you share, and only what you share. There is no internet search, no filling in the blanks with information from somewhere else. It is a closed system built entirely around your memories.
The AI's job is simply to weave those stories together in a way that flows — to find the threads you might not have noticed were there all along, and to put them in an order that carries people through.
The stories are yours. They always were.
A safe space for complex losses
Karen also touched on something I think is important to say plainly.
Not every death is simple. Not every story is easy to tell. When loss comes wrapped in trauma — suicide, addiction, complicated relationships — the thought of sitting across from another person and trying to explain it can feel impossible.
TreulogyAI doesn't judge what you share. It doesn't offer advice or platitudes. And critically, you only share what you want to share. If there are parts of the story you're not ready for — or that you don't want in the final eulogy — you simply don't include them.
As Karen said from her own experience: "There is this feeling of safety with the AI, as if I'm just typing this into a machine and it doesn't judge me, and it's not going to judge my dad."
For some families, that safety is the thing that makes it possible to begin at all.
"I wouldn't be here supporting it so adamantly if I didn't really feel that"
Karen has spent her career in service of the dying and the grieving. She is not someone who endorses lightly.
"I wouldn't be here supporting it so adamantly if I didn't really feel that and believe it too — that this could be just so helpful for people, especially at the time of a death, for people who wish that they could read the eulogy, and to have help writing it, and give them the confidence to speak it."
That means a great deal to me. And it means a great deal that her father's stories — the campfire, the deer on the hillside, the lessons tucked gently inside the endings — finally got the words they deserved.
If you have stories you've been carrying
You don't have to have lost someone recently. Karen's father died years ago, and TreulogyAI gave her something she hadn't expected: the chance to finally say what she'd always wanted to say.
If there are stories you've been holding — for someone you've lost, someone you're losing, or someone you want to honor while they can still hear it — TreulogyAI is there when you're ready.
You bring the stories. We'll help you find the words.
You can listen to the full conversation with Karen Wyatt on the End of Life University podcast. Karen is the founder of EOLU and the author of several books on death, dying, and finding meaning at the end of life. You can support her work at treulogy.com/eolu.
