Best Man Speech After the Groom Lost His Dad (Heartfelt, 3.5 Minutes)

The speech

Good evening. I'm Lazlo, the best man. Fitzgerald and I were assigned the same freshman dorm room at Pitt, and he spent the first night labeling the shelves. His side, my side. I have been living on my side of his labels ever since.

I want to tell you about a porch.

The summer we were twenty-two, my grandmother needed her front porch painted, and I volunteered both of us, because I was broke and she was paying in lasagna. I had a plan. One Saturday, two rollers, done by lunch. Fitz showed up at seven in the morning with a scraper and a wire brush, looked at the porch for a long minute, and said, "We can't paint over that. It'll peel by October."

So we scraped. All day Saturday, in July, in Squirrel Hill, on our knees. My grandmother brought out lemonade three times and told him twice that he was the good one. We did not touch a paintbrush until Sunday afternoon. I complained the entire weekend and he did not say a word. He just kept scraping, and at some point he found a rotten board under the steps and replaced it without telling anyone, because he had bought one on the way over, just in case.

That porch is thirteen years old now and it has not peeled. My grandmother still brings it up. That is Fitz. He does the part nobody sees, the scraping and the sanding and the board under the steps, so the part everybody sees will hold.

For a long time he did that for everyone else's porch. Then he met Oriana. The first time I visited them in the house on Beechwood, there were two scrapers hanging in the garage, and the one with the pink tape on the handle was not his.

Oriana, I have watched a lot of people stand around while Fitz does the boring part. You are the first one who got down on your knees next to him. You have done the part nobody sees for him too, more than once, and one of those times was two years ago, when his dad died. Bartek would have been at the head table tonight telling the caterers how to do it, and I think he would have told me what Fitz keeps telling me, which is to say it once, say it warm, and get to the toast. So that is what I'm doing.

Fitz, you have never once asked me for anything, and you have replaced about four of my rotten boards. I am glad you found someone who checks under the steps.

Everybody, glasses up. To Fitzgerald and Oriana. It is not going to peel.

Why it works: The story is about the groom, not the loss. The father gets one warm sentence in the exact spot where the bride is being thanked, so the grief and the gratitude share a beat and the speech never stalls on either.