My eulogy for Dad, delivered at Bethel Baptist Church on West 38th Street on Thursday Dec. 1, 2011.
[begin]
Many of you probably don't know me, or don't remember me. I'm Dad's first child. My name is Chuck.
There's something I must say first before I talk about Dad: many people saw Dad through his declining months, and everyone at that house on Grant Avenue played a role, but two played a greater role than others. Mom and my sister Linda demonstrated incredible strength, and not the sort that most of us are able to muster on short notice for a short time, but a persistent, determined strength that kept them at Dad's side at times they may have otherwise needed to eat, or sleep, or relax. And I know Dad knew that.
...
One of the last things Dad said to me, only a few weeks ago, was:
"I know where I'm going, it's just no fun getting there."
Some of you know Dad's spiritual side better than I do, because you were in Sunday School with him, or you served with him as a deacon, or had him as your deacon.
I saw Dad read his bible / in a corner of our family room / every morning for as long as I remember. He always had a cup of coffee next to him. When he saw you getting your morning coffee, he would mark his place, close his bible, and pick up his own cup.
That was an invitation to talk.
You weren't interrupting his faith, you were at that moment entering it, because he lived it, and if you were around him, you lived it with him.
[the church]
The first time I said goodbye to a member of this church family, I was a child. It was my first exposure to death that I can remember.
She was Bethel's church secretary. I don't remember her name, but she worked in the church parsonage over at Bethel Baptist Church on East 26th Street. Some of you remember that building as Bethel East. I knew it before there was a Bethel West, this building we're in today.
I still think of this building as the "new church." That was when Pastor Andrus preached two morning services each week until Bethel East was sold and this location became the final home of the church and school.
Names from those days sound stern, almost biblical.
Names like Amendola, Brewer, Longstreet, Hutnyak, Henninger, Gribbin, Giles, Zwald, and so many others.
Some of you know those names. Some of those names are represented here today.
And if you were up here, / instead of me, / you'd probably add another name: Cairns
[memories]
I started writing this in November of last year, over a year ago, not because Dad was battling cancer, but because it was inevitable that I would one day be standing here, / and thoughts were coming to me that I didn't want to lose.
Clumps of thoughts, / uneven, / out of order, / like life. / And I began recording them, but if I recount them here, they'd be little more than verbal snapshots. Let me instead recall Dad in broader strokes:
* Dad was quiet and thoughtful. He could sit among others chatting and be content just to listen. He was always thinking, forming opinions, and enjoyed hearing yours; only on subjects where he strenuously disagreed with you / would you get any inclination that was the case.
* But of course it's one thing to be able to talk and choose not to, / and quite another not to be able to talk, which was where he found himself at the end, and I know that bothered him. He worried aloud frequently that he wasn't very good company.
* He was a man of few words, / never preached. If you didn't know how he felt by how he acted, you just weren't paying attention.
* Dad never complained. Not about anything.
* I used to smoke. / I used to drink. / And Dad never judged me once, not once. I think Mom and Dad wore out the knees in a few pair of pants praying for me, but they never judged me.
* Dad had an unshakable work ethic, and his example has allowed me to keep my job when many around me were losing theirs, / a number of times. Anyone that knows Dad knows he couldn't abide laziness. All he asked is that you try and he'd treat you like you were the best worker on the team.
* Dad loved sports, but never pushed us into them / or judged us by our ability to play them, or be good at them, or want to be good at them.
* Dad questioned the ways of the world, but loved the innocent little bits that make life so magical. We welcomed Santa Claus every Christmas, and the Easter Bunny on Easter, and looked under our pillow for a quarter after losing a tooth. These things never detracted from from our faith; the distinction was always clear, even in our little minds.
* Dad said a few times, "If they knew what I thought about some things, I might not be a deacon." He never told me what those things where, and I never asked.
* You may find it hard to believe, but I didn't know there was such a thing as anti-Semitism until college. Disliking someone based on their color or religion was utterly foreign to me. I never heard it in our home, or, just as importantly, in any home my family entered, and I think that's because others respected Dad's stand on a lot of things, and watched what they said around him and those close to him.
* He was a gentle man, and much loved. He never had an unkind word to say about anyone.
* At the end of a long discussion on evolution, politics, or salvation, Dad would say something like, "If we can't know, does it really matter?"
* By which I think he also meant, "I don't need to know / to know it matters."
* Dad and I disagreed on a lot. I suspect Dad knows now how wrong one of us was, and I will know that someday too.
[Truth be told, we more often agreed than disagreed.]
[end]
There's a scene from the movie It's a Wonderful Life where the angel Clarence tells George Baily, played by Jimmy Stewart, "Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?"
Dad would not have been the same without having known you all. And each of you are irrevocably changed for having met him.
We touch each other in a million ways. Most of them forgotten, but each of them indelible.
Considering how long I've been thinking about this moment, this seems all too short.
But how can you adequately memorialize a lifetime in a few minutes?
You can't. It's already been memorialized in me, and you.
I never heard Dad quote a bible verse, but there's one that came to me over a year ago when I began contemplating this day, / and my own mortality: Romans 3:23 says, "For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God." Well, some fall a little closer to Glory than others, and Dad was one of those.
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