GREGORY HEACOX
Eulogy
As I struggled to prepare these remarks I was, and am humbled, and frankly,
nervous.
So I looked up the meaning of the verb eulogize and it had this to say:
“To speak or write in high praise.”
That helped some.
I can do that, speak in high praise of my dear friend, Greg
Heacox. But I am still nervous, because I do not know if I can do the subject justice.
There is so much that could be said.
April, 1996
The six of us were seated around Jay’s dining room table eating bean soup,
Margaret had lovingly prepared. It was the night before the six of us planned to tell our
existing firms that we were leaving to start our own firm. We were all scared, and Greg
especially was having second thoughts, but then Mike Koshmrl spoke up, employing
some of the emphatic adjectives he learned growing up in a bar on the Range: “Ah,
bleep! You’re Greg bleepin’ Heacox, for bleep sakes!” That broke the tension. Greg
stopped acting like a girly mon, and the rest, as they say is history.
May 15, 2013
On the last day of Greg Heacox’s remarkable life family members gathered in a
crowded hospital conference room hoping for hope, ready to believe in a miracle,
expecting Greg’s indomitable spirit to carry the day, yet again.
His sister, Dianne, spoke passionately of how Greg had fought against health
issues his entire life. Of how as a child in he’d endured repeated hospitalizations for
pneumonia, of the families move from Renville to Bloomington to be closer to his doctor.
Of the daily routine of self-care and medication he required throughout much of his adult
life, just to live, let alone to arrive at the office at 7 a.m., six, sometimes seven days a
week, to provide for his family, whom he loved so much.
And then a gentle, but firm, hospice care doctor, delivered the hard facts that there
would be no hope, no miracle, no fight left. Greg’s ravaged body was under assault by
opportunistic infections and pathogens, his systems shutting down. The vast and dizzying
array of monitors, tubes, drugs, and machines were unable to avoid the now inevitable,
barely able to forestall the impending end.
And then, a young doctor spoke quietly, the words that will always echo in my
memory of our friend and loved one’s courage, “He is alive because of who he is.”
I think the young doctor was telling us that Greg was still alive, at all, because he
was Greg Bleepin’ Heacox. The doctor may have been speaking of Greg’s heroic struggle
over the past 12 days, but he could as easily, and certainly accurately, have been speaking
of Greg’s entire life over 62 ½ years. Greg lived and was alive because of who he was.
His virtues, and they were many, sustained him not just in spirit, but in body, until the
end.
A Man of Character
Greg Heacox was a great lawyer, and an even better human being. That has been
the recurring theme of the past few days as our office and Greg’s family have been
flooded with words of condolence and universal expressions of love and admiration for
Greg. It is, I think, a universal phenomenon - that we often fail to recognize great people
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among us for their true stature until we step back and see the whole person. Or, sadly,
until they are gone and compel our attention.
One of the attorneys that he had cases against described Greg thus:
He was a first class man; smart, hard-working, honest, honorable,
practical, genuine, engaging,
funny and proud, especially when he was talking about his kids and
family. The world needs more
people like him. I’ll sorely miss him.
Greg Heacox, husband, father, son, sibling, partner, and colleague was a man of
stature and character in the old fashion sense of the word. His life was lived according
to true and fast principles. But like a lot of people of great character, he did not speak of
those principles; he revealed them in how he conducted his life and his profession.
Courage
The ancient Greeks believed that courage was the source of all virtue. They could
have been thinking about Greg Heacox.
He showed us every day what courage looked like merely by coming to work.
His health frequently was an issue, but he either rallied courageously from serious life
threatening illnesses or worked on through others. He worked despite his deteriorating
health until a week before his final hospitalization.
He showed us in so many ways what courage looked like. It often looked like a
tired, overworked fellow with plenty of excuses to take it easier, but with a steel will to
meet his own uncompromising expectations, to keep his obligations and not to complain.
He showed us what courage looked like and how contagious courage can be. And in so
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doing he elevated us quietly, inexorably without fanfare and made us better and braver
and stronger than we were without him.
Effort
If there was an overriding quality to Greg’s character besides courage it was the
value of effort. He did not preach it, but he often said “You’ve got to put in the time”. If
you volunteered to cover a conflict for him he did not simply dish the file off to you, he
put in great effort to bring you up to speed, to make your job, of helping him, easier.
He was uncompromising in his expectations of associates. That was his idea of
mentoring – to give you the work, the opportunity – set the expectations and then it was
up to you to give the effort, to do the work up to expectations. He believed there was no
shortcut to learning our craft other than the effort to do the work.
He showed us. He showed us every day what effort was and what it meant. What it
could sew and what it could reap.
Humility
Greg would have been uncomfortable with all the accolades. Greg never trumpeted
his prowess as a lawyer. In fact if you listened to him tell, he never won a case. I cannot
recall once in 17 years as one of his partners, that Greg ever mentioned a case he won.
Plenty of cases where he lost, but no wins! Unlike most lawyers he did not talk about his
victories. Instead he spoke self-deprecatingly of his losses. The people who counted,
though, the clients, knew.
Greg knew the security guards in our building by first name. And the names of their
kids, whom he would ask after. And the young immigrant who cleaned our toilets and
emptied our trash, too.
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Like the gentleman that he was, he did not consider himself above others regardless
of occupation or station. He was most comfortable in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt
standing on the side line or the end of the rink at one of his kids games. He remained to
the end the small town kid from Renville via Bloomington who put himself through law
school working construction with his buddies.
Despite his health problems Greg was a three sport athlete in high school. He told
a story often of one of his high school baseball games. Greg was the third baseman and
his team was in a tie game in the late innings with the other team having the winning run
at third and a dangerous and feared, right-handed power hitter up to bat.
The
Bloomington coach ordered his infield in to cut the winning run off at the plate. This
meant Greg and his teeth needed to play dangerously in on the grass.
You might ask what happened. Well, as Greg told it he didn’t know, professing to
have closed his eyes and only learned second hand from a teammate, that the batter hit a
screaming line drive through Greg’s legs to win the game. He was lying of course. Greg
never closed his eyes in the face of challenge.
Ever.
But he was not above taking
dramatic license to diminish his achievement, especially if it made for a good story.
Humor
The many accolades for Greg we have received remind us also of how much fun it
has been to practice with and be around him.
We will miss his laughter and his irreverent sense of humor. We will miss our
politically incorrect conversations behind closed doors. I will even miss his warped sense
of one man one vote by which he held me personally responsible for all the sins of the
Obama administration, including his high taxes.
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As seriously as Greg took his work, he never ceased to find humor in our
profession. And he never ceased to give a hard time to virtually whomever he was
talking. The only technological advancement that really suited him was caller id, because
it gave him the opportunity to rip or raz the person on the other end of the line without
wasting time on preliminary niceties, like, “Hello, who’s calling?”
Kindness
I suppose that in the popular view the notion of a lawyer (especially a defense
lawyer) and the virtue of kindness in the same sentence is an oxymoron. But not in
Greg’s case. Among the accolades for Greg from his colleagues were these:
“A worthy advocate, but never nasty or mean;” or
“Twenty years or so ago I found out what a true gentleman Greg was when he
was defending a case. My client clearly had some mental issues. . . . her psych records .
. . referred to Greg as "the devil Heacox". He was so nice to her. At the time of her
hearing she was so nervous she couldn't keep from shaking. Greg could have easily
destroyed her on cross, but he approached her with kid gloves and was overly polite and
nice. He won and I so admired him as a person from that day forward.”
He demonstrated that toughness and effectiveness are not the same as cruelty and
scorched earth tactics. That is the hallmark of not only a kind person, but a true lawyer
and gentleman.
Greg was also a devoted son who, despite his own health problems, and his busy
practice found time to assist his sister Dianne in caring for their mother who suffers from
dementia.
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Professionalism
Greg always had his client’s best interest at heart. He could stand up to a client
when their interest required it, as readily as he could stand up for the client. And yet, it
was always about the client, and if they insisted on a course of action Greg pursued it
with the zeal of his oath.
He may have been at his best when he was mad. And yes, he had a temper. But we
were always amazed at how, despite his emotions, he still thought clearly and spoke,
well, scarily. You did not want to be a witness, an associate or a teenage son busted for
some transgression (Zach and Sam) if Greg had that ice in his voice! His expectations
were hard to meet, but in the end he sought not for you to meet his expectations, but to
develop and meet your own.
Shakespeare once wrote, in his less famous, couplet on lawyers: “And let us do as
adversaries in law do, strive mightily and eat and drink as friends.”
Greg Heacox strove mightily over a long distinguished career, but in the end there
were few he couldn’t eat and drink with as friends when the striving was set aside.
Quirks and Rules
Greg had his virtues, but he had his – quirks - as well. They caused us to laugh and
tease him incessantly and he gave back as good as he got.
One of his quirks, for instance, was his consternation that increasingly the people of
consequence who held sway in our lives – doctors, lawyers, ministers, plumbers, police
officers, all, looked like they were in junior high.
Greg’s Dad was a clothing salesman, from whom Greg almost certainly inherited his
remarkable work ethic. His Dad would go to the store where he worked at all hours and
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days of the week because his customers might need him. Similarly Greg was nearly
always at his desk at 7 a.m. when the phone started ringing from clients who started the
day calling Greg, for advice, counsel, or more likely, just to give and get a hard time and
start the day with a laugh. Lawyers who called at that time usually received an earthy
greeting unsuitable for our purposes here.
Greg retained a good portion of his
Bloomington locker room vocabulary, and he was known to employ it enthusiastically.
When we formed our little law firm in St. Paul in 1996 Greg explained the
difference between a Minneapolis necktie and a proper St. Paul tie. A St. Paul tie had to
be a rep striped tie, no more than two colors and, this part is important, it had to have
some form of food stain, either original or aftermarket. I never could get that right. Try
as I may my neckties were always dismissed derisively by Greg as “Minneapolis” ties.
Greg’s office was quirky. You did not need a hazmat suit to go into it unless you
were going to look in his frig.
I am not saying this to be critical, but facts are facts.
Prominently displayed on his office wall was a large deer head, which, I believe he shot
at a garage sale, but which Debbie would not allow in the house. We did our best to steer
visiting clients clear of his office. His office was testimony to that law of physics that
things in motion tend to stay in motion and things at rest tend to stay at rest. If you put
something down in Greg’s office it stayed at rest, for years, unless it was case file!
But the overriding feature of his office, as it was of his life, was his family. Photos
of the kids in various athletic endeavors were everywhere.
hockey, baseball and softball.
Zach, Sam and Hannah in
Zach, Sam, Hannah, you guys cannot begin to imagine
how much joy you gave your Dad with your athletic exploits and how proud he was of
each of you. Someone called his office a shrine to his kids and they were right.
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Debbie and the Kids
20 plus years ago Greg met a pretty paralegal at Jardine named Debbie. Greg would
frequently go down stairs to a movie bringing an associate and this pretty paralegal with
him. I am not sure in what part of the theatre the associate sat, but I am betting it was not
in the back row with Greg and the paralegal! The pretty paralegal, of course, is sitting in
the front row here, blushing.
For all the immense energy, passion and effort that Greg put into his profession it all
pales by comparison to his love and devotion to his family.
Greg cared little for
accolades. He cared everything for Debbie, Zach, Sam and Hannah.
As a result we
know more about his kids than about Greg himself. And not only his partners and
members of our firm, but lawyers far and wide. If you had a case with Greg there was a
good chance you were going to hear about the life and times of Zach, Sam and Hannah.
No one minded; you guys were the only subject he boasted about!
Perhaps some of you may have heard, on the day he passed away, Hannah pitched a
6-0 shutout, striking out 15 batters in six innings. She said her Dad would have wanted
her to pitch. And of course he would have. She followed that with two more victories on
Thursday and Friday, including another shut-out and bundle more of strike-outs.
Hannah, somewhere Greg is sitting in the shade with his Pony sweatshirt on and beaming
with pride.
Conclusion
It is so tempting in this time of passing and grief to dwell on what we have lost.
And make no mistake, Greg’s death is a great loss to us all, especially Debbie, Zach, Sam
and Hannah.
But we would be well to do the math and calculate how much we have
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gained by the time we’ve been blessed to have with Greg Heacox. Time when as
husband and father, son, brother and brother-in-law, colleague, friend, partner he made us
better by being among us and showing us how things were done right. He made us better
in ways that will resonate beyond his death and remain a part of us, as he if never left.
In the end, Greg’s life reminds us that difficulty need not deter us from goodness and
honor. That character and love, trump all.
Zach, Sam and Hannah, your Dad loved and was proud of each of you beyond
reckoning.
You each are the repository of his remarkable character in your own
character. You will find it if you look within yourself. Your Dad would want you to
have courage always, as he did, to hold your heads high, be brave for your Mom, for each
other, for yourself and for others. He would want you to give your best effort in
whatever you do. He would want you to be proud, but humble, just as he showed you.
And he would not want his untimely death to steal laughter from you. All of us must go.
We mustn’t let timing end our laughter.
***** *******
Oh, but he gave us such a hard time and we laughed and loved him so!
~Eulogy delivered at Greg’s memorial service, May 20, 2013 by Roderick C. Cosgriff,
shareholder and friend
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