Thankful

I wrote this two and a half years ago and read it at my father’s funeral. I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently and wanted to post it here, for my own reasons. After all, it is Thanksgiving and I am very thankful for having an old man as great as him.

The greatest thing my father ever taught me was to put everything I have into whatever it is that I’m doing, leave it all on the table, and live a life of no regrets… He taught me a lot of other things, too, but he didn’t exactly convey the messages like Yoda did, when Yoda told Luke Skywalker that there is no such thing as try. My dad was more subtle than that. Here are some of the things he left me with:

My dad liked to win in a covert kind of way. He also had strong hands. Growing up, we would get into some epic hand battles. Of the “mercy” nature. When I was little, I watched my brother and him go at it and I wanted in… So I would initiate them and in less than a minute I would inevitably end up running away to my room in tears to sulk. I would always come back to try to best him though, and eventually learned how to do it some time in high school. There is a lot of strategy involved in making a man submit by squeezing their hands. There is also a lot of satisfaction in knowing that you outsmarted that man enough to make him submit.

My dad had a quick wit, so I learned to have one. Just before going off to college, I remember parading around the house without a shirt on one particular afternoon, flexing and admiring myself in front of him. I was probably eighteen, or so, at the time. His response, as he was reading the paper, was that he’d seen bigger chests on 12 year old girls…

My dad showed me unconditional love when I chose to volunteer to deploy to Iraq in 2003. We talked about it before hand, and he definitely didn’t want one of his sons going to the desert at all let alone volunteering for it. But it was something that I had to do, so I went. Once my decision was made, he supported me every step of the way, and never brought it up again. He wrote me E-mails almost everyday and we’d always end up comparing the weather in Bullhead City, Arizona to Tallil, Iraq to see who was living in a hotter place. My temperature would crush his most of the time, but it got close every once in a while. The old man was a complete nerd about the weather. It was his way of keeping tabs on his kids spread out all over the place. We all ate it up.

My dad taught me the virtue of patience by remaining calm and waiting out any problem that stood in his path. I distinctly remember this lesson because I had returned from the desert and wanted to put new springs, wheels and tires on my car. It was Christmas Eve at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama and we were the only people in the Auto Hobby Shop besides the guy who worked there. I had downloaded How-To instructions from a message board I was on and we were three hours into, what turned out to be, an eight hour job. The old man was “supervising” when it dawned on me that he didn’t really know how to do everything, like my mom had espoused for so many years that it was embedded in my brain. He did, however, know how to take his time and problem solve his way out of sticky situations. We ended up finishing on Christmas day, and that lesson has been invaluable to me ever since.

I remember wanting to have guts, while reading books like The Red Badge of Courage and The Things They Carried at the Zoo. That was, in large part, the reason I faced my fears in a parachute at 4,500 feet and got my face pounded in the boxing ring for a bit. I thought I knew about intestinal fortitude, but again my dad showed me what the word courage really meant over an 11 month period. He faced his death sentence head on by going through two full rounds of chemotherapy when he could have, just as easily, accepted his fate and lived as comfortably as possible for a couple of weeks when he was first diagnosed. Nobody could have faulted him for that… But he chose to fight it, even though it turned out to be really hard on him.

The amount of respect that I have for that guy is immeasurable.

I cried a lot of tears when small cell lung cancer changed my life forever in 2006 through 2007. I also learned that I will always be just a little boy standing in a giant shadow cast down by my old man, looking up to him in admiration, and trying my best to make him proud.

I really wish that we had more time together, because I loved learning from him. But in the time that we had, he taught me how to be a man. And I think that’s all a son can ever ask of their father.