Friday, June 08, 2007
What People Are Saying About My Dad...
We are in the middle of the memorial process, having completed the visitation yesterday with the memorial service today. The business of the process is a welcome distraction, but the intrusiveness occassionally borders on barbaric. But I have to remind myself that my mother, sister, neices, nephews and I are not the only ones to have experienced loss. I probably have the easiest time of it because I was with Dad - there is a certainty to the circumstance for me that they do not share.
My father was a man of amazing professional accomplishment, and a true American success story. Yet few people I have spoken to these days are aware of those accomplishments - oh sure, the people he did them with know, but even they are not talking about them.
One of my dad's best friends, a guy he has had breakfast with every Thursday for 22 years, summed up best what EVERYBODY has said. Dad more than anyone they knew demostrated the ACTS of the Christian life. So many people have come to me to tell me their story of how my father helped them, from finding a job to probating their parents will for free to just sitting with them when they were lonely, the theme is dad's willingness to give. So many people have come to me telling me how Dad was their strength and their help and how will they get through situation X without him?
That is the epitath I know he would want - helper, friend, servant.
Pray for my mother, her broken clavicle is going to require a bit of surgery next week. Pray for my sister - she is carrying the weight of her family, her grief and my mother.
Pray for all those that find themselves without the assistance and comfort my father so freely gave. I certainly am not up to the task
My father was a man of amazing professional accomplishment, and a true American success story. Yet few people I have spoken to these days are aware of those accomplishments - oh sure, the people he did them with know, but even they are not talking about them.
One of my dad's best friends, a guy he has had breakfast with every Thursday for 22 years, summed up best what EVERYBODY has said. Dad more than anyone they knew demostrated the ACTS of the Christian life. So many people have come to me to tell me their story of how my father helped them, from finding a job to probating their parents will for free to just sitting with them when they were lonely, the theme is dad's willingness to give. So many people have come to me telling me how Dad was their strength and their help and how will they get through situation X without him?
That is the epitath I know he would want - helper, friend, servant.
Pray for my mother, her broken clavicle is going to require a bit of surgery next week. Pray for my sister - she is carrying the weight of her family, her grief and my mother.
Pray for all those that find themselves without the assistance and comfort my father so freely gave. I certainly am not up to the task
