something personal (from someone else) I had to share

This is by my friend Lucinda. Margo and I have long been her friend, going back years. Recently, her father died. This is her eulogy, which she posted on facebook. (I did blank out the last name just for privacy’s sake). It just touches something we have all felt, about one person or another. Plus I knew him, and he lived up to these words.

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A “eulogy,” derived from the Greek for “praise,” is a speech celebrating the character of one of who has died: what I want to praise in Marvin xxxx, my father, was the way he cherished the living.

One memory: when I was very young, Dad worked for the Tuberculosis Commission; he’d sometimes take me round to one-room schools up in the mountains where he tested the kids for TB. Faced with these barefoot kids, some of whom peeked a little fearfully around corners at us strangers, Dad smiled, and joked, and quickly drew them in, so that soon he was surrounded. They trusted him and for the first time I saw Marvin xxxx as somebody other than “my father”: I experienced him as a kind and capable person moving through a much larger world than my house, or yard. And I was proud.

50 years later, when Dad’s sense of identity began to falter, he’d bring out mementos and souvenirs from this earlier life: a certificate of acknowledgement from former governor Martha Layne Collins, a document attesting to his status as an honorary member of the Mexican Air Force, some old newspaper clippings, a diploma from Georgetown College. Once he handed me his personnel file from the Navy, photocopies of his performance evaluations, and asked that I take it back to Maine and read it. “This is about me,” he said, as though he needed a witness to his existence, and character.

These performance reports, which I looked at again last week, praise his excellent command of the English language and his enthusiasm for his job, but mostly they commend him for his ability to relate to new personnel, his ability to make them feel valued, and needed. Such openness to others can only come from optimism, and several commanding officers mention this quality, too—what one calls his “sincere cooperation and optimistic outlook on life.” I’ve been thinking about this optimism a lot since Dad died. The man I knew approached people with trust, hope, and the desire to give them the benefit of any doubt. He didn’t expect the car to break down, or the horse to lose, or for people to reject his overtures. Instead, he praised; so and so was a “really smart fellow,” such and such “a really nice lady.” Praising was his gift. His immediate family in particular benefitted from his irrepressible desire to see the best in others and, as his dementia increased, so did his generosity. We’ve laughed about his tendency to endow us with degrees, jobs, and capacities that, truth, we didn’t always possess.

Now, without Dad’s generosity of spirit, his rose-colored mirror, we all, I suspect, feel more vulnerable, somehow less intact. It was easy to ride on his optimism, to take it for granted, to bask in the knowledge that someone was generous enough to think that we were really that special, that good. Yet the kind, smart people that Daddy saw in us were not entirely figments of his imagination. We actually did become more gentle, playful, and loving persons in his presence. Because he saw in us what we couldn’t always see in ourselves, he made it possible for us to be better.

So thank you, Daddy, for your embrace of the living. Thank you for brightening up when I walked in the room, for knowing when I wanted to talk, and for always starting the conversation. Thank you for looking away from my faults, for assuming that I would succeed, and for teaching me what it feels like to be loved without limits or conditions. I’m so very lucky to have been your daughter.