This is the first episode of our new series Thanks For Being Here. It will be a very short pod that comes out every Sunday morning as Sundays are, for a lot of people, a time of reflection, a time to let go of the day-to-day and to touch base with what matters, what will matter, and what will have mattered.
The answer to that question for me is often found in ceremonies. I could literally watch strangers get married once a week, and I’m even more affected by funerals, sitting in a service, taking in the story of one life, just another ordinary person who they loved, who loved them. I feel a clarity and direction that I often can’t find in the daily push and pull and eulogies in particular are about the most succinct source of direction I can think of.
So, I asked readers and listeners who have lost someone to share their eulogies and every week I’ll read one here so that we don’t forget, there is a point to the pain, that we have much to offer, that we affect each other and that ordinary lives are really kind of exquisite when you look at them closely. This is Thanks for Being Here.
This first episode features a eulogy beautifully written by my editor at Random House, Andy Ward, to honor his father.
When I was a kid my Dad had this expression that used to drive me insane. He’d only deploy it in certain situations when my 10 or 12-year-old angst and self-pity reached its insufferable peak. We’d be in the car on a Saturday afternoon on our way from the mall, and I’d be wallowing in the profound feelings of betrayal that can only come from say, driving all the way to FootLocker only to discover that they don’t have the shoe you want in your size. Or we’d be at the kitchen table at the old house on Aldenham Lane, and I’d be complaining about the cruel injustice (even though I wasn’t very good) of not having been selected for the Babe Ruth League All-Star team. My sense of entitlement apparently knew no bounds. He’d listen to me patiently, take it all in, and smile. “Well,” he’d say, “if this is the worst thing that ever happens to you, consider yourself lucky.”
Now when I say that sentence out loud here, without my Dad’s kind face to lend it context and meaning, I realize that might sound a little tough or even dismissive, but I promise you, he was neither of those things. He didn’t mean it that way, would never have meant it that way. Though I’m not sure I understood that at the time. What he was doing was just rolling a little perspective grenade under my door, nudging me gently toward self-awareness and encouraging me to see the world as he did: as a place that was full of beauty and joy, a place that we were lucky to be a part of.
It wasn’t like my Dad went around doing cartwheels, telling us how lucky he felt all the time. That would have been annoying and my Dad was the least annoying man who ever lived. He simply demonstrated it in the way he moved through the world. Like any good writer, he preferred to show not tell. I remember on lazy weekend days, we used to just get in the car and go for a ride, a couple of hours on a sunny afternoon, with no real destination in mind. Leesburg, Middleburg, Harpers Ferry, Bull Run. This was back before northern Virginia was strip-malled and box-stored to death, and we’d soon be out in the countryside, all rolling hills and stone fences, and he would remark as we drove along, how beautiful things were, how old that house must be, what Civil War battle had taken place in that field right over there. The name of the mountain we could see in the distance, from the overlook we’d just pulled into. I always think of this now, when I see people interact in the world. There are people who look out the window and there are those who don’t. My Dad looked out the window.
There were so many things that brought him joy. His 8 years as a young Foreign Service officer in the Middle East, which I think was the true formative experience of his life – the thing that defined him and showed him how big and fragile the world really is. The months he spent crisscrossing the country on the ’88 Vice Presidental campaign, which I imagine made him feel like he was part of something thrilling and important, and that the words he wrote might even play some small role in shaping our future. Not to mention it was the first time he’d really been away from my Mom for any sustained amount of time since they met when he was 14 years old.
He loved standing out on his little dock behind the house on Turtle Pond Drive, in his terrycloth robe and black work socks, gin and tonic in one hand, fishing rod in the other, relaxing for a few minutes before dinner. He loved the egg-eating scene in Cool Hand Luke, the opening credits of The Sopranos, which tapped into some deep-seated pleasure zone in his brain, somehow connected to his New Jersey roots. The little green sign for Tony’s Creek in Bloomfield, just off the ramp for Exit 142 on the Garden State Parkway, which my parents always pointed out to my brother, Tony like he’d never seen it before. He’d seen it a thousand times.
Going antiquing on Saturday afternoons in York, Pennslyvania with my mom, and stopping for a slab (his word) of apple pie in the Amish diner. The maraschino cherry at the bottom at the bottom of his Manhattan. A slice of cold key lime pie. A Good Humor toasted almond bar. A handful of honey-roasted peanuts. A mouthful of RediWhip, taken straight out of the can. The last paragraph of the Wapshop Chronicle by John Cheever, which ends with the lines, “Stand up straight, admire the world, relish the love of a gentlewoman, trust in the Lord.” The poem, Birches, by Robert Frost, which contains the lines, “Earth’s the right place for love. I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” That one passage in Richard Ford’s novel, The Sportswriter, that begins “Better to come to earth in New Jersey, than not to come to at all.” Going out at night to sit in his car by himself and listen to the Yankees game, trying to catch the signal as it wafted down from New York, via AM Radio waves on clear summer nights. Playing hookey from work and taking me to the racetrack in Charlestown, West Virginia, where he let me place $2 bets on the ponies, which definitely wasn’t legal, and where I once won 33 bucks playing the daily double. The look on his face when he told the story about the time Tony drove our Ford Pinto through the garage door. The scream that ensued when he would sneak into the bathroom when my unsuspecting mom was showering and dump a glass of ice-cold water over the top of the stall. Sitting in bed on a weekend morning next to my Mom, knees up, drinking coffee, swapping sections of the Sunday paper, and doing the New York Times Crossword puzzle like it was nothing. Collecting Folk Art. Collecting Political Memorabilia. Collecting an absurd number of antique blenders, which must have reminded him of his summer days as a soda jerk on the Jersey Shore. Reading obsessively about, of all things, the Spanish American War. The primal thrum of his IBM Selectric when he switched it on. Being with his grandkids, every one of whom felt they had a special relationship with their Papa, because they did. His wife, my Mom, for whom he wrote love poems, twice a year, on her birthday and their anniversary, as a way of expressing his love and marking their life together, all 59 years, 2 kids and 5 grandkids worth of it. Waking up early, making himself a cup of truly terrible coffee. Going for a long walk to the end of the island in Kiawah and coming home with a handful of sand dollars and stories of a dolphin sighting.
This is what I mean when I say my Dad was a person who considered himself lucky. He could appreciate the world and his place in it. I think it was what he was trying to teach me to do too.
I wanted to be sure I spent some time today talking about these things because the last couple of years have been particularly hard, as many of you know, and it has become so easy to forget that there was a time before Parkinson’s. A time when, though he never complained, my Dad would have actually considered himself lucky. It scares me to lose sight of that because that’s not who he was.
In the last few months of his life, Tony and I spent a lot of time with him, making sure he was comfortable, and that he knew how we felt about him. One day about a month ago, I just laid down next to him in bed, took out my phone, and started asking him questions about his life. About what he had learned, about his regrets. His voice, by that point, was the softest whisper. I had to hold the phone right up near his face to record it. My Mom was still sitting there, by his side, doing her crosswords. He felt fulfilled. I could tell. He was ready. He also felt lucky. At some point I asked him what he felt was most important in life. Ultimately, I said, when it comes down to it. He paused for about 30 seconds. “How fabulous it is to have 2 sons who have blessed us with so many gifts.”
Last week, in the days after he died, Tony and I decided to start going through my Dad’s stuff and setting aside the things we wanted to keep. At the bottom of a stack of papers on his desk was a yellow legal pad, on which we found the beginning of a letter, written in his shaky hand, just after he had gotten home from Kiawah, in June 2018, the last time he would ever go there, which I think he knew. The handwriting alone tells you how much of a struggle it was to write this, and yet, that he tried. The letter was addressed to “Dear Family,” but it seems to me when I read it now, that he was really writing to himself. We had flown him down there and it was a hard trip. He wasn’t able to get out of the house much or go to the beach, but we drove him around a lot, and he sat outside on the screened porch and looked out on the little lagoon behind the house he bought there almost 30 years ago. “Don’t worry,” he wrote, “this isn’t the letter, hopefully, that will come later. But I can see, even today, how difficult and painful it will be to say goodbye and thank you. I think the motivation today (and here he’s talking about the motivation to sit down and write this letter) was the brief but wonderful happy feeling I took away from our visit in Kiawah and the thrill that an old man can still feel when standing by our pond and all the memories that it ignites.”
The letter ends mid-sentence at the bottom of page 1. There is no page 2. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that since we found it. Where’s page 2? Was there a page 2? What else did he want to say? What did he want us to know? Well, maybe this is what he wanted us to know: that note of happiness, of fulfillment. An old man confronting mortality, who can still access that wonderful feeling of peace and gratitude for his family and the world. I miss my Dad terribly. And I’ve spent a lot of time, in the last couple of weeks, on my back, at 3 am, thinking of things I wish I could have said to him before he died. The truth is, it’s hard to come up with one. We had every chance to tell him what he meant to us. He knew he was loved. But if he were here with us today, this is what I would say to him: “Dad, this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and I consider myself lucky.”
