Nothing quite captures the expansive, rubberbanding nature of the human condition like siblinghood. Indeed, these are the folks who will bruise your arm one minute and then casually drop off a container of Korean takeout the next. They’ll make you laugh, scream, go broke, and question your sanity at every conceivable moment, and not a single one of those moments will go by where you wouldn’t move Heaven and Earth for each other. Am I generalizing? Yes, absolutely, and I’m very lucky I can do so while being sincere (love you, Mikey).
And really, that’s the heart of these relationships; sincerity. There’s a spoken and unspoken vulnerability/familiarity between two people who grow up together, and it is our presumption that Reed Madison Ryan, may he rest in peace, would reprimand his sister from the great beyond if she didn’t take the opportunity to give him a chuckleworthy eulogy that only a sister could give. Luckily, she did just that.
In the five-and-a-half-minute eulogy delivered by TikTok‘s @robynrayy, Robyn opens with a disclaimer that humor is far and away one of the healthiest coping strategies out there, and that the more hygienic sweetness that permeated the eulogies before her’s were just as important as the brand that she was about to deliver.
And deliver she did; Robyn offered up what she believed to be the three best descriptors for her brother (slow, weird, and dramatic) before pairing each of them with a hilarious and intimate anecdote, all of which earned the warmth of the crowd tenfold. It all culminated with some heartfelt personal words to Reed, and an iconic recounting of the time that Reed stopped a fight in the school cafeteria by picking up one of the combatants and simply walking away. By the end of the speech, it feels as if those of us watching from TikTok knew Reed ourselves.
What else can we say but bravo? By the sounds of it, Reed’s service was an enormous one, and the utter honesty and humanity of Robyn’s eulogy very clearly gave off a healing energy that everyone was in need of. Robyn’s opening claim about humor as a coping mechanism isn’t unfounded, either; according to a piece by Dr. Marilyn A. Mendoza on Psychology Today, a Kent State study observed that 85 percent of 132 observed nurse-based hospice visits involved humor of some kind, and 70 percent of those instances were initiated by the patient.
In other words, there’s laughter in life, and therefore there should be laughter in death. So thank you, Robyn, for being an irrepressible force for good on that front.