Eulogy for my dad

Not something I ever thought about doing, for sure, eulogizing my own father...

My brothers spoke beautifully at the wake, and I said these words at the funeral. Tough to capture in a few minutes what he meant--means--to me, but I gave it a shot. I had a vivid dream about him last night, and I don't recall my dreams often. He was in his forties, I think, and he was coming up the hill talking to me. I was present-day, and I knew he was dead, but there he was. I chased my younger brother up the back stairs; I called over and over "Did you see him?" I didn't get an answer...

Here's the eulogy.

I’m sure you know the Mark Twain quip: "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." And you might know the Jesuit expression: “Show me the child at seven, and I’ll show you the man.”

Well, if I showed you my father in the last month of his nearly seventy-seven year life, you’d know the man very well, and you’d be astonished by how much he knew.

I talked with my father nearly every day over the last twenty years. Sometimes these would be five-minute conversations about the state of the world as I dropped off the mail. Sometimes I’d have some new hare brained conspiracy theory to run by him. Amazingly, he never once insinuated that I was nuts; he was always extremely interested, and oftentimes I’d return later in the week to find he’d done his own research on the topic. From his end, it was always apparent he was looking for some unified theory of the universe.

These conversations intensified in the months and weeks leading up to his death. Two weeks before he died, we talked about Shakespeare’s “All the World’s a Stage” piece from “As You Like It”, where the seven stages of life are outlined, and he quoted from memory the last lines: “Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” He lay back and said, “Wow. How did I get here?” And then we began talking about the various ways life ends.

Later, I had downloaded some stories by a Canadian writer, Alistair MacLeod, for him to listen to on his computer as he lay in bed. One week before he died, I came in to find him listening to these beautiful stories, and he flung his fist into the air and said “I’ve got to play these to my class and say this, THIS is how you write!”

On Monday, two days before he died, with his voice reduced to a whisper, I, an avowed agnostic, told him, an ever more skeptical believer, if there were indeed some afterlife, to somehow show me a sign from beyond. He smiled and whispered a few lines from a poem I didn’t know and squeezed my hand. Later, I traced those lines to an obscure Ohio poet named Paul Dunbar, and the verse goes:

“What dreams we have and how they fly


Like rosy clouds across the sky;


Of wealth, of fame, of sure success,


Of love that comes to cheer and bless;


And how they whither, how they fade,


The waning wealth, the jilting jade —
The fame that for a moment gleams,


Then flies forever, — dreams, ah — dreams!”

That same day, my father said “Put it up, the poem, put it up on the blog”, referring to a piece he’s written this past summer. I’d read it back to him a few days before…he’d spent some of his precious remaining time self-editing in his whirling mind and found it suitable for public consumption. It goes like this:

The poet said,

“I think I shall never see

a poem so lovely as a tree,

For poems are made by fools like me

But only God can make a tree.”

I thought that strange and prob’ly wrong;

Raised in town, I wasn’t strong

On Maples or on Chestnut trees.

But poems I knew and I could breeze

From A.A. Milne through Chaucer’s best.

But know I’m old, and trees it seems

Have changed a lot (Or maybe not),

And this I know, there’s a promise here,

That year by year the Winter’s sere

Turns with help to Summer’s green

And we’re no less than all those trees.

So maybe there is hope for us

That you and I will green again,

A second coming, as it were,

For each and every one of us.

Next to my dad’s desk in a filing cabinet is a folder marked “Story Ledes”. In it are articles about the Islamic Revolution of 1979, metaphysics in a time of terrorism, a sky watch map of the stars for the week of June 28^th, an examination of the geologic time scale, an article entitled “Is God a Scientist?, an email from my brother Matt containing a Bobby Kennedy speech on the menace of violence, several articles about the mysterious death of Micky Thompson, a race car driver he knew, a chart explaining the difference between Sunni and Shiite, a magazine containing a series of photos of covered bridges taken by his own father, and an article discussing the teaching of poetry to West Point Cadets. In his last two weeks, he played over and over a mind-blowing six minute history of the universe I downloaded onto his computer.

Unified theory, indeed.

My father was my father, my coach, my banker, my editor, my fan, my hero, my best friend, a man who cared nothing about fame, fashion, or fortune, and above all, my teacher. To the very end.

For in those final two days, when he could not speak a word, I knew his brain was still working feverishly to decode the mystery of it all. The body had failed, but you could almost see the mind racing. And that is his final lesson to us, his three sons, now half-way through our own lives: keep thinking, keep trying, keep wondering, keep searching, keep reading, keep writing, keep questioning, keep hoping; tomorrow’s another day in which to excel.