My Dad passed away a couple weeks ago. Monday was his birthday so I thought I’d post the eulogy I wrote. Felt like a necessary prelude to returning to Tumblr, regular life.

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Eulogy, as delivered

For my brother and me, my Dad was like a mountain you live your whole life in the foreground of, from childhood to adulthood. You can’t imagine the skyline without it.

I want to convey to all of you what my Dad meant to my brother and me but it’s difficult to describe that kind of large, looming presence. It’s easier to describe pieces of him.

I think of sounds. His sigh as he plops into a chair. His ring finger drumming on the steering wheel. The low rumbling engine of his Grand National Buick. You could hear the car from blocks away and when my brother and I were kids, this sound signaled that Dad was back from work. We’d run out the front door to the end of the block, then turn around and run parallel to the car as he approached our driveway, waving him home.

Here’s an analogy: In baseball, there are two kinds of homerun hitters. The first kind stands and watches, making a big deal out of his homerun—he’s a showboat. The second lowers his head and jogs briskly around the bases—he’s done this before and plans to do it again.

My Dad came from this, second school. He was a grin-and-bear-it kind of guy—confident but not boastful. I remember as a kid seeing a TV commercial for a skuzzy plaintiff’s attorney (no offense if any are present) and I asked my Dad why HE didn’t have a TV commercial. He delicately explained to me that he didn’t need one.

He didn’t crave the limelight. He took big cases but he didn’t seek media attention. During one high-profile case, the Dispatch ran an article on the lawyers involved and the paragraph on my Dad said he had a reputation as the firm’s “junkyard dog.” I remember him saying, mostly facetiously, that he was hurt by that description. I don’t think he saw himself that way. I was 21 at the time and shocked—I had absolutely no idea my Dad had a reputation as a fierce and intimidating trial attorney. He was a compassionate father, and never once raised his voice. He wasn’t a bulldog at home.

But that was him—he had competing sides to his personality. My Dad could be brutally honest, especially about himself, and he wouldn’t want me to canonize him. It’s fair to say the relentlessness and diligence that made him such a successful attorney had a flip-side: he wasn’t as present as he would have liked to be for baseball games, piano recitals and the thousands of less official moments that collectively make up one’s childhood and adolescence. He didn’t realize that was the trade-off he was making at the time, and years later I think he regretted it. Not necessarily regret that his younger self made that decision, because he was smart enough to understand that his younger self NEEDED to be an outstanding attorney for important, personal reasons; but I know he regretted that his sons and he hadn’t spent as much time together as we might have.

Fortunately, the three of us got a lot of quality time together the last two years. His original diagnosis gave him 10 months, but he lasted twice that. I’ve never really understood what it meant for someone to “bravely battle cancer”, but I can tell you what it meant for my Dad: Getting up every day and trudging through treatment, even though it made him feel sick. Showing up every day and working your butt off, in other words.

My Dad had a curmudgeonly side. But the flip-side to that was a brave stoicism. He never surrendered, allowed no self-pity. In two years of battling a rough disease, I never heard him say he was feeling worse than “mezza mezza”.

To me, that was an admirable fight, befitting the way he lived his life. He didn’t make a show of it. He just put his head down, and grinded his way around the bases.

I think my brother and I inherited that low-key demeanor from him. He left us other things as well—his work ethic, his love of language. And to this day when I hear a low rumbling engine I still have the same thought from deep within my consciousness: “Dad’s home.”