Compass Journal

Eulogy

Eulogy

My father passed away last Tuesday. The end came quietly, which was a mercy, and with enough time for his grandchildren to gather around him. He went the way he would have wanted: surrounded, and at peace.

I spent the weekend writing a eulogy for him. Not to read at a service. To write my way toward something I’couldn’t reach any other way. To pull the good things out of the fire before the smoke settled over all of it.

That same week, without looking for any of it, three things found me.

The first was Tolkien. A line I’ve known for years that arrived with new weight:

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off.”

I’ve always read that as a warning. This week I read it as an invitation. The door is open. The road is there. The only real danger is staying on the threshold.

The second was T.S. Eliot, from Little Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets:

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

I’ve been exploring for a long time. The road has been longer and harder than most people around me knew. And I find myself now, at the end of something, standing in a place I recognize but have never quite seen clearly before. Myself. The person who was always here, underneath everything that accumulated over the years. It turns out you have to travel the full distance before you can know the place for the first time.

The third arrived on Friday evening. My grandson Daniel stood on a small stage at his school and sang, in his own earnest and imperfectly beautiful way, a song I’ve loved since I was young.

Here comes the sun. And I say, it’s all right.

Little darlin’, it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter. Little darlin’, it feels like years since it’s been here.

I’ve heard that song hundreds of times. I’ve never needed it the way I needed it that evening. There is something about a child singing about the end of winter, without knowing what winter you’ve just come through, that reaches past every defense you’ve built and lands exactly where it needs to land.

I feel that ice is slowly melting. It seems like years since it’s been clear.

George Harrison wrote that song in 1969 in one afternoon, sitting in Eric Clapton’s garden, coming out of a dark period of his own. Simple chords. Three words that carry everything: it’s all right. Not everything is resolved. Not everything is healed. But the light is coming, and that is enough to move toward.

I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to feel right now. A friend told me recently that after years of carrying what I carried, I should probably let someone take stock of what all that weight did to the structure. He may be right. The body keeps score. So does the heart.

What I know is this: my father left me things I am still learning to name. The habit of rising before the sun. A standard of how to treat every person you encounter, regardless of where they come from or what they do, a standard I watched him live, not preach. The particular stubbornness that looks like grit from a distance. The understanding that enough is a strategy, not a limitation, that you can build a life of richness and adventure and belonging from whatever you have in your hands, if you’re willing to be resourceful and present. The loyalty of showing up even when no one is watching. Even when the stadium is empty and the occasion seems small. That was him. He never missed.

And then there is the generosity. Not just the kind that writes a check or opens a door, though he did both. The kind that shows up in the lives of people you didn’t know he had touched. In the days after his passing, we’ve been discovering them still. His church was full. Friends, family, friends of friends, people who traveled to be there. Four brothers who have walked different paths, and yet the thread that runs through all of us, and through everyone who came to say goodbye, leads back to the same place. The foundation was firm and on solid ground. The rest we built ourselves. And that made all the difference.

There was a moment, near the end, that I will carry for the rest of my life. He came to me after a particularly hard day, sat down close, and said the things that needed to be said between a father and his firstborn son. Things that had waited a long time to be spoken. He told me I was his first joy of fatherhood. That he saw me. And then, forehead to forehead in the dark, his voice quiet and silent tears we shared together: you have mettle, character, wisdom and fortitude, and above all, a good heart.

I choose to believe him.

The compass still works. It always did. Sailing forward now, anchors aweigh. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.

- Manuel E. Familiar