Eulogy For My Father
Mount Lawn Memorial Chapel
Whitby
December 23, 2006
Thank you all for being here today.
We are blessed to have had my father with us for so long and I will forever be grateful
that the family was able to gather together with relatives and friends to celebrate his life
on the occasion of his 90th birthday in September. How wonderful it was for him that he
was able to hear speeches normally reserved only for funerals and that we were able to
tell him while he was alive how much we loved and respected him.
It does leave one, however, with the problem of how to follow-up today. “Speak from the
heart “, Anita said, and that is what I intend to do.
There is no dignity in death or, for that matter, in birth. The beginning and ending of life
are messy and often painful. My father fought hard to stay with us, he “raged against the
dying of the light “, as Dylan Thomas once wrote. It was painful to watch him go. In the
end, when he lost the fight and his life spirit left him, we were in a sense left only with
the shell of the great man he was. But in a large sense, we were also left with something
much more.
I remember telling my sister Susan’s children when they came to the hospital to say
goodbye to him that it is not a tragedy when an old man dies. It is not a tragedy if we
preserve and remember what my father’s life stood for. In life, he had dignity, and honour
and he had great wisdom. He loved and was loyal to his family; to my mother - his wife
of 65 years - to his children, their spouses, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren and
they loved him. He greeted each person in his life with openness and compassion and the
odd corny joke. Remember, in our family we never eat oxtail soup – it wastes too much
of the ox! And when we order an alligator sandwich in a restaurant we always tell the
waiter to, “make it snappy”.
Despite his many accomplishments he was a modest man who loved to laugh and who
treated all, young and old, as equals worthy of his time and attention. No, it is not a
tragedy when an old man dies if we remember and preserve the lessons of his life and of
these, above all, was the great power of love and loyalty.
I miss him, as you do, and I always will, as you will. But when I close my eyes I see him,
coming towards me, a happy and robust man wearing a checked shirt and mismatched
sweater with his hand outstretched in greeting, a wonderful smile on his face, and a kind
word forming on his lips. “Welcome”, he says. “I love you”, he says. “Talk to me a while
and let us have a laugh and share life’s lessons” he says. That is the way he was. And
that memory is worth preserving and cherishing and striving for in our everyday lives.
And to his grandchildren, a final thought. I know that if he could speak to you today he
would say to you,
“ My dear grand-children, death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next
room. Whatever we were to each other we still are. It is the same as it ever was. There is
unbroken continuity between us. I am waiting for you somewhere near.
All is well”