On Sunday, July 25, we had a memorial service for my dad back home. At the same funeral home where we had Mom’s, but it’d been remodeled. Much like the maternity ward at Mercy Hospital between my birth and Liam’s.
Anyway, afterward, my aunt told me the only thing one of my cousins heard was that my father wasn’t a good father. In light of this, I’ve decided to put the whole eulogy online. For anyone to read.
When I sat down to write this, the line What have you done with the garden entrusted to you? was stuck in my head. It ultimately became my inspiration for the eulogy, but I didn’t include it and I want to make sure you know where I’m coming from when I weave plants back in at the end. Here goes:
The Wind, One Brilliant Day (by Antonio Machado, trans. by Robert Bly)
The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.“In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.”“I have no roses, all the flowers
in my garden are dead.”“Well then, I’ll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.”The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
The Wind, One Brilliant Day by Antonio Machado – Famous poems, famous poets. – All Poetry
“What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”
When our mom died, I learned that it is in your early 20s that you realize your parents are people. So I tried to know our father as a person over the last 16 years. Here’s what I learned: In the morning, he would flip between Fox News (the news station his wife preferred) and CNN (the station his wife would talk over until he changed the channel back to Fox) to try and get a balance of the information. He voted Green Party and Democrat since 2004 after a lifetime of Republican voting because he didn’t want his son drafted the same way he had been.
He remembered the last time he could carry all three of his kids at the same time and it was always one of his happiest moments.
A couple of weeks ago, while I was doing a 5K with one of my brothers-in-law, we were discussing legacies and stories. We observed children are the keepers of their parents’ stories. When my chapbook was released, my father read it and was embarrassed to find out how much I listened to his stories about growing up in Kalkaska, being drafted in the military, meeting my mother, and his early days as a doctor here, in Grayling. At a family gathering, he warned his siblings and their spouses not to tell me anything because I would turn them into poems for the world to read. Not that the world reads poems, but anyway, I still listened to his stories. And he told me some good ones.
Here are a couple of my favorites that have yet to make it into poems or creative nonfiction. (I expect his brothers to correct any falsehoods at the post-service.) After failing out of university in his second semester, he hitchhiked to California and then onto Baja California, where he met a woman named Inez whose grandmother didn’t approve of him. On his way to Baja, he ran into a bloke who recognized him as one of Sue Gosling’s brothers but didn’t know which one. This guy offered Dad a place to stay in San Jose, but Dad opted to lock himself in the bathroom of a laundromat instead. When a laundromat employee found him the next morning, he threw Dad out. Dad returned with donuts and helped clean up the store. After some time in Baja, Dad rang home and Sue told him his mother was worried about him and it would be nice if he could get this out of his system and make it home for Christmas. Listening to his older sister like a good little brother should, Dad locked himself in the San Jose laundromat bathroom again, but had the donuts ready.
Somewhere in Iowa, Dad was picked up by a guy who had just left his wife and son and was headed to Detroit to stay on his brother’s couch. Neither of them had much money, so they had to pick up another hitchhiker and that guy paid for gas and bologna sandwiches. “The best bologna sandwich I had,” Dad told me. When they going to Detroit, Dad told the driver to sober up and go home to this family. Then Dad started moving north. He made it home for Christmas.
As kids, nearly every meal (holiday or regular) was at Grayling Mercy Hospital. In the basement, there was a hallway we name Mr. Echo for reasons that only make sense to three small children and their father. Going to see Mr. Echo was exciting. We went after dinner. Dad and one of us would stay at one end, while the other two would go to the other and we’d just scream at each other and listen to it echo through the hall, which really couldn’t have been more than 40 feet long, but was miles long when I was four. One time, a hospital employee came across two of us, appearing unsupervised, cackling with laughter as echoes rang around us. Obviously upset with his discovery, he asked how we got down there and where our parents were. Then Dad poked his head up from behind an unused bed, a huge smile across his face (you know the smile). “The hallway echoes,” Dad explained. “It’s some post-prandial entertainment.”
When we were in our early teens, Dad decided to have a weekend away with each of us. Meaghan opted to go to Sault Ste. Marie and stay in our nearby family cabin. Dad forgot proper socks, so Meaghan and her best friend, Shannon, tried to act like they didn’t know the guy following them around with dress socks pulled halfway up his calves. Life was always an adventure with Dad. He never shrunk from a challenge, physical or clothing. He wasn’t fearless, but he was confident. And that was inspiring. He encouraged the three of us to be independent; maybe not hitchhike to Baja, play house with someone, and not call home for months, but to be ourselves and to be good humans while completing that task.
Though he was raised in a Christian household, my father was a secular humanist. He believed doing good was the only option we have, so he followed his conscience. Maybe at times to his detriment, but he was stubborn. In our house, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure was an instructional film. Not for its amazing historical accuracy, but because of the phrase Be excellent to each other. It became a refrain of Dad’s. Especially while we were fighting. I know the three of us have carried it into adulthood as well as the example both of our parents set of radial acceptance.
However, to say his relationship with his children was complicated is a very large and generalized understatement. He once admitted to Liam that after the loss of our older brother, my father was done having children. So he had three more. Logical choice.
This isn’t meant to slag our father; I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find the words to properly eulogize the man and to do that I have to put it straight. Because that’s the relationship I had with my father; when it mattered, I didn’t hold back and he asked me to keep it that way. He wasn’t a perfect father. He was mentally, physically, and verbally abusive. He wasn’t doting or overtly supportive. He wrote his children out of his will at at time his eldest daughter had cancer and his son gave him two grandchildren.
He would never say he was perfect.
After he counted up the amount he spent on his sailboats over the years, he called me upset because that was money he didn’t spend on us. A real fan of and advocate for self-care, I explained to him the importance sailing held in his life, how it encouraged him to take time off work and how important that example was to us, how sailing on Lake Charlevoix gave the four of us common ground when we didn’t have it anywhere else. How none of us would change our lives with Booma, Hot Mustard, and the Spider Boat (aka She-Bang).
Losing a parent at 23 led me to realize parents are people. They make mistakes. Dad told me of a couple he made in his early years of medicine and how he would choose differently now. When I opened myself to seeing him as a person rather than a parent, we cultivated a relationship, I wouldn’t change for anything.
The ones we look up to become people who struggled with their choices and their lives just like we do. Parents falter in the rules and teachings they imposed, and we are left to deal with the heartbreak and the healing when the fog of loss has cleared. But even when we’re in the midst of this, we should maintain hope in ourselves and our parents. Whatever our complicated relationship, we still loved each other.
As we continue to move forward in this orphaned life, I pray we see the good seeds our parents have planted for us. And that as we grow without them, we cultivate the roots we were given and work to pass them onto the next generation. I know we’re already doing that with “Be excellent to each other.”
This is what I want to leave you with today. This is what I’ll boil all Dad’s exploits down to: A 1980s classic film with bad special effects and questionable historical accuracy:
Have adventures.
Do what you love.
Wear whatever socks you want.
And be excellent to each other.
So that’s the eulogy. As I said in the text, I spent a lot of time trying to find the words to give the world a final picture of my father. Our relationship was complicated for so many reasons I’m not discussing here, but I wanted to honor our relationship in the service.
