My Father's Eulogy

I gave my father's eulogy a year and a half ago. It was the midst of a very dark year. He was very fit and healthy, recently cured of Hepatitis C that he'd gotten from a blood transfusion when he was 20. But he suddenly got crippling back pain that was quickly diagnosed as cancer. He had always joked about getting Do Not Resuscitate tattooed on his chest (he was an ambulance driver for our local volunteer EMS), but he allowed us to convince him to do the chemo and try to beat it, mostly because he hoped to get more time with his grandkids. As it turned out, it gave him only about four months, and it's hard to say if it could have been any worse without the treatment. 

Those four months turned out to be the same four months I was interviewing at Google. I was the first employee of a small startup where I'd been working for almost two years, when the founder suddenly laid me off. That turned out to be the same week we got my dad's diagnosis. I started doing a lot of interviews, which went well at first, and then less so. My self confidence slid into depression. By the time I'd lost hope of getting anything but contract work, Google made me an offer. My first day ended up being three days after my dad died. 

It wasn't hard to give my dad a good eulogy. He was a fantastic father and a true pillar of the community. It was clear just looking around at the crowd packed into his memorial service that he'd touched a lot of people. I remember saying that he leaves a very high bar for me with my own children. 

Within a few months my mom and her sister were both widows, and this after losing their brother to suicide a couple years earlier. My uncle had what he thought was a small stroke just before my dad's memorial, but upon getting a second MRI, it turned out to be brain cancer. He stayed at the hospital for two weeks while they worked up a prognosis; they gave it to him and he died the next day. I was lucky to have visited him at the hospital; I had no idea it would be our last. 

I'm very impressed with my uncle. Just a year before he died he did what he'd always wanted to: he bought a boat and spent the summer sailing it solo up through Canada. My dad even met up with him and they spent a week or so aboard exploring the coastlines. Neither had any idea how nearly their times were up, but it goes to show why it's so important not to put off your dreams. 

I managed to visit my dad on probably his last good day between chemo treatments. We drove up into a forest a friend had told him was a good mushrooming spot and tromped through the underbrush gathering chanterelles. It was a perfect day and blissfully familiar. I'm so glad I have that memory of him at the end instead of only his hospital deathbed. The most tragic part is that my son will not remember him, and even my daughter, who at four had enough of a relationship with him to have a good cry upon his death, will probably only know him through stories. Perhaps some of those stories will end up here, because my father is worth remembering.