On Sunday, February
17, 2013, I memorialized my father’s passing from this world to the next in a
service spent with family, coworkers and friends. In a military funeral, his
life was honored and cherished by those people that touched him. I personally
gave the eulogy. Per my family’s request, this eulogy is reprinted here. It is
my hope that other may read this so they too, may live a life so giving, loving
and dedicated to his family as my father.
In the play Julius Caesar (II, ii, 30-31) Shakespeare once
said "When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves
blaze forth the death of princes."
The reason I say this is because this year the comet ISON
will appear in the sky in one of the most spectacular astronomical shows ever
seen in our lifetimes. Coincidentally, in the year of my father’s birth, 1940,
the comet Cunningham
made an equally spectacular appearance.
These two events act as bookends to what was an equally
blessed life.
While my father was not a hero in the traditional sense, he
was nonetheless representative of a kind of heroism rarely talked about these
days. It’s a heroism that is symbolic of the generation he came from; stoic,
principled and noble. Today, our heroes are reflective of the world we live in.
Today’s heroes come from great events, tragic circumstances, and sports
figures.
Yet, true heroism can come from a very different place; from
the silent courage it takes to go to work every day, to provide for a loving
wife and for children and their needs. The courage to always put their needs
ahead of his own needs, to set aside personal aggrandizement for the humble, to
willingly submit themselves to the daily
grind needed, to afford those he cared
about, a quality of life that few had access to.
We went to private schools while Bill worked the thankless
job of building tunnels in the ground to provide clean drinking water to the
people of New York (a job that also provided for millions of others he would
never know). He was an Operating
Engineer working the cranes above New York in the bitterest of winters. And when the city he grew up in, began to
wither and die, he moved us to the sunny shores of California, to provide a fertile
ground for his family to blossom. He sold cars, working a slave’s hours so that
his wife could live in a beautiful home in a safe neighborhood there; and when
God saw fit to shake the foundations of those mountains, he once again took the
family to safer ground here in AZ.
I have never known that sort of courage; to put family needs
before one’s own. To place myself second to those I loved. That kind of heroism is of a different
generation, of a different state of mind. To provide for family, to prepare for
any unforeseen eventuality, to live vicariously through the joys of his family,
is something that is so rarely seen any more and is so desperately needed by a
weary world. His disappointments in life were met without complaint and without
regret; he was a man that looked forward, not back.
If more acted in this manner, the whole of society would be
better for it, as I know my family was.
Even in death, as he fought for life when cancer had ravaged
his body, he refused to die until his loved ones granted him permission to do
so. He could not bear to act selfishly even as death claimed him. His legacy
was not of a man that runs into burning buildings, but that of a man who builds
the buildings in the first place.
This heroism is the legacy of my father.
Just as Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar of comets
heralding the coming and going of princes, he wrote about the passing of heroes.
This passage from Antony and Cleopatra, Act V, Scene One describes it best, and
it applies to my father, as much as it did for Marc Antony.
"Shake
with terror when such words pass your lips,
for fear
they be untrue
and Antony'd
cut out your tongue for the lie!
The breaking
of so great a thing should make
A greater
crack: the round world
Should have
shook lions into civil streets,
And citizens
to their dens: the death of Antony
Is not a
single doom; in the name lay
A moiety of
the world.
And if true,
if for your lifetime,
boast that
you were honored to speak his name even in death.
The dying of
such a man, must be shouted, screamed!
It must echo
back from the corners of the universe.
"Antony
is dead! Mark Antony of Rome lives no more!"
Sometimes,
heroes are given to us in the form of an ordinary man.