Almost a month ago, I posted a story titled Eulogy written the day after my father died. While it was clearly about my father’s death, it was about me more than him. Yesterday was his memorial service, and what follows is what I read. It contains elements of the first piece but shifts the focus. Is it weird for me to want to post this? I don’t know, maybe. But it seems strange to spend so much time writing something and then not post it.
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When he turned seventy, we gathered in a nondescript Rockville restaurant, a long table in a windowed annex, tall potted ferns decorated the space. My father. His wife, her kids, my brothers, our spouses and me. Those who had children brought them. My father made a short speech, wrapping it up with “Now, I’d like to live to one more birthday with a zero in it.” A few minutes later we sang him Happy Birthday with at least one of his smartass sons adding on to the end of the song “and te-e-en more.”
About His life: His mother died when he was an infant. His father died ten years later. When he was a teenager, his sister, already an adult, handed him off to a neighbor, and she moved to England to get married. His first wife, my mother, died of cancer. His second wife, Diane, died of cancer.
I once discussed my father’s life with a therapist. She gasped. “He’s lived a life of abandonment.” Seemingly. But true to form, his final months were brightened by a budding relationship with Carla, a lovely woman from his assisted living facility.
Never give up. I think that was my father’s guiding directive. In fact, as we cleaned out his apartment after he passed, I found a black coffee mug emblazoned with the words: “Never, never, never give up,” a famous Winston Churchill quote. Incidentally, it’s also the title of a popular song sung by Thomas the Tank Engine. So clearly, it’s an ideal held by the most prominent statesmen of the modern era.
I never once heard him complain about the hand he was dealt. When his sister died in the 1990s, living alone and without any savings, I mentioned to my dad that her life sounded bleak. He responded that “we each make our own bed in life, and then we need to sleep in it. She picked her own path,” he said with a head shake. This brief exchange probably helped me understand my father more than anything else he said to me in my prior thirty-six years of life.
My dad was the ultimate bootstraps kind of guy, meaning he pulled himself up by them, constantly. When adversity struck, which it did repeatedly throughout his life, he regrouped, picked a direction, and kept moving. He simply wasn’t one to dwell in the bad, to engage in self-pity. He remade his bed and moved on—even at the very end.
In his years at Sunrise Assisted Living, my dad rekindled his love of chess. He would play all takers, who were, unfortunately, few and far between. Most of his matches came from a bright high school kid who generously visited Sunrise periodically to brighten the resident’s days, and from Russell, a friendly young member of the Sunrise staff. Chess is a game I never mastered. It requires players to always be planning their next three to five moves. I’m horribly stuck in the present, so my opponent’s counter-moves always come as a giant surprise. My father, though, worked in the future, planning contingencies, plotting a course. He always knew where he was going next.
A couple of days before he died, my dad had an unusual half hour of clarity. Susan and I had a nice but frank conversation with him about the approaching end of his life. As he recounted many of the milestones in his life, he was wistful, but not particularly sad. He even wondered briefly about what waits for us after we die. And then a nurse came in, and my dad cracked a joke that left us all in stitches.
My dad well exceeded the ten years he asked for at his seventieth birthday party (even if that wasn’t what he meant). He lived an impressive life and left a strong personal and professional legacy. He’ll be remembered lovingly and with respect by the people who knew him. For me, I love that my last real interaction with him was that final conversation he had with Susan and me. One more time, adversity pinned him down, probably for the last time, but I could tell he was already considering his next move.
Previously Published on jefftcann.com
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