It's been a hard month. Soon after my last post, four weeks after my father's vehicular encounter with a deer, he died. The really excellent medical staff gave him every chance they could, but his body was just too damaged to keep going. We had the memorial service over Labor Day weekend, and I'm staying in the US until the end of September. I will probably reflect more on this experience and my thoughts in the future, but for now I'll just copy in what I wrote about him for his eulogy.
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Dad was a collector. He collected things and he collected ideas and people. Every single thing that he saved was something that he either thought he could repair or something that he could use again in a new way. People he collected because he loved learning their stories and making friends with them. He was a very good listener, willing to explore people's ideas and beliefs when they didn't agree with his own, and also quite interested in sharing his own experiences. In high school a personality test classified him as strongly introverted. The instructor said that very few people ever change their basic personality type, and my father decided that he was going to be one of those rare exceptions. By the time I came along. I knew him as an extrovert. He talked to strangers at restaurants about their cool T-shirts, he made friends with people he sat next to on the airplane and invited them to his home, and was willing to talk to anyone. He joined so many clubs and made sure to learn people's names and learn about their stories and their lives. When I was a kid, I was very shy and a bit embarrassed by how much he talked to strangers. I'm still quite introverted, but now deeply admire his ability to connect with people and make friends with almost anyone.
He was a great father. This is actually an astounding achievement considering how difficult his childhood was. We kids were given Independence within boundaries. We were allowed to have a voice and opinions and my father valued our ideas and knowledge, even as kids. Above all, I always felt loved. I know that later in life he wished he had spent more time with his kids and less time at work, but I always felt like he was connected to us and a loving parent to us.
Everyone will say this, but he really was a mechanical genius. There was no device or motor that he couldn't fix and he was always engineering solutions. He could find a plastic spoon on the ground at the fairground and scrape it on stones to make an impromptu splint or tool. Or he could design and build custom-made parts for furnaces or furniture or anything you could think of. When I bought my first home, he and I spent 2 years building a bathroom where previously had been an attic. I was so proud that we could do that together and that I could learn from him.
In his autobiography, he wrote that legacy wasn't terribly important to him. I assume that was because his actions in the here and now mattered more. But he does leave behind a legacy. With my mother, he built a nuclear family of people who love each other deeply, strong bonds with friends that he has made across the decades, and wonderful memories of dirt bike riding and DIY projects and sharing life together with friends.
I would say that my father was equally proud of two things- his ability to engineer a solution to almost any kind of problems, and the relationships he had with his family and friends. On our weekly phone calls, he would relay to me the status of all of his current projects, and then follow that with interesting conversations that he had with people. It really meant a lot to him when someone appreciated him for his caring interactions with them.
When he retired, he had even more time to devote to relationships. He spent a lot of time on the phone and taking trips around the country to maintain close connections with all of his siblings and as many of his nieces and nephews as he could. To me, he seemed like a loving and interested patriarch of the family.
I will miss him so much.
