Eulogy for Father
For the first time in my life, I'll celebrate Father's Day this year without my dad. The man who had the most influence on the man I became passed away on April 14. Jack was 79.
It has been said that the loss of a parent is one of life's most traumatic events. I now know the devastating truth of that statement. I've been told that, in time, the hurt will fade, only to be replaced by positive memories that soothe the soul. Already, I can feel that happening.
Maybe it's because my father and I had a simple and loving relationship. He was a remarkably good man, like many of the inspiring role models and mentors who frequently appear in Fast Company's pages. Like them, he was a person of devotion and integrity, a man who understood a hard day's work. Yet, unlike most of them, he never had the advantage of a college education. He worked pretty much his entire life in two places: a dye house and a post-office sorting facility.
His core accomplishment was family. And as his only child, I was the lucky beneficiary. My father poured vast amounts of love and energy into me during my most formative years. That is why I measure his life in the warehouse of photographs and movies he created for me. It is why I measure it in the size of his hands. Because what I remember most about my father are those sandpaper-rough hands, made rugged from factory work. From my earliest days, he took my hand in his and we discovered the world together.
With his hand in mine, we walked through New York's Times Square. We went to Tad's Steakhouse, where you could get a T-bone, a baked potato, a hunk of garlic bread, and a tossed salad for $2.79. We went to my grandmother's house on Saturday afternoons for endless games of gin rummy, Parcheesi, and Chinese checkers. We went for long hikes on Sunday afternoons, through the nearby woods. We hitchhiked together. We played music together -- he on a keyboard, me on a drum kit. We strolled the railroad tracks together in Paterson, New Jersey, laying pennies on the rails and waiting for the train to pass so we could use the flattened coins for guitar picks.
We fished together, in rowboats, off riverbanks and bridges, in rivers and lakes, with worms and fish eggs, and lures and flies.
Readings in Race, Class, and Gender. Ed. David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelenyi. 2nd ed.
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. “Racial Formations.” Race, Class, and Gender in the United States. Ed. Paula Rothenberg. New York, NY: Worth Publishers, 2010. 13-22. Print.
Today, the most difficult day in my family’s life, we gather to say farewell to our son, brother, fiancé and friend. To those of you here and elsewhere who know Dylan you already are aware of the type of person he was and these words you will hear are already in your memory. To those who were not as fortunate, these words will give you a sense of the type of man he was and as an ideal for which we should strive. My son has been often described as a gentle soul. He was pure of heart and had great sensitivity for the world around him. He had a way with people that made them feel comfortable around him and infected others to gravitate toward him. Dylan exuded kindness and pulled generosity and altruism out from everyone he touched. He was everyone's best friend.
Trigger, Bruce G.. Ancient Egypt: a social history. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Print.
When I was a young child, my dad was my idol and hero. He seemed to know everything and had the solution to every problem. Any difficulty I had, anything I didn’t understand, my dad had the answer to everything. It seemed like it was every day that he taught me a new valuable life lesson and always had wise advice to share. My dad used to work all day long in Boston and my brother and I would wait by the door to greet him with a crushing hug as soon as he came home. I used to wait eagerly for my dad to come to my room to read me a bedtime story and then tuck me into bed. My dad could do no wrong. He was right about everything and knew how to deal with anything. However, as I grew older, my convictions changed and the image I had of my dad fragmented.
Brewer, Douglas J., and Emily Teeter. Egypt and the Egyptians. N.p.: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
Healey, J. F. (2011). Race, ethnicity, gender, and class: The sociology of group and change (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge Press.
Losing my father was a major obstacle in my life. However, through overcoming this hardship, I was able to learn a great deal about myself and how to overcome other obstacles. Through observing my mother and how she dealt with her loss, as well as my own, I found strength and a different view on confronting obstacles. Additionally, it taught me to seize every moment I can. While losing a parent is a very difficult obstacle that I would wish on no one, in an unfortunate way, losing my father taught me many things about
My dad is my hero. As a young child my father was everything to me. Although he didn’t choose favorites between my sister, brother and I, I was always his princess. My dad would take me everywhere with him. Sometimes he even took me with him to work. He was a truck driver so he could take me when he wanted. My father was my best friend.
So, in order to have a way to cope with all of these events, explain them, the people created an intricate system of deities and beliefs. They “believed the universe and all events that occurred within it were governed by the will of the gods” (20) - gods like Isis and Wepwawet. This helped them make sense of why certain things happened and the way their world operated: “If the annual inundation of the Nile was too great or too scant, it was because the river was angry… Not because of weather patterns in central Africa,” and, “The gods embodied not only natural phenomena but also abstract concepts such as justice, kingship, protection, and truth” (20). Religion gave Egyptians a sense of purpose, belonging and security - it wiped away their fears of the natural world and gave them an explanation for anything that previously, they would not have been able to fully comprehend. Furthermore, the Egyptians often portrayed their gods as animalistic - the god Wepwawet (the figure on the right in the artifact), for instance, is portrayed with the head of a jackal. This is because, “An animal-headed image of a deity was an attempt to visualize the multiple aspects of that god. The human part of the image indicates that no ordinary animal is depicted and the animal part symbolizes the superhuman endowments of the
Eulogy for Son The Death of a Child. Not many people realize that the death of a child is NOT in accordance with God’s NORMAL scheme of things. It is not a natural. God did not mean for a child to go first. A child buries the parent.
Religion was not a monolithic institution, it consisted of a large variety of different beliefs and practices, all of which were linked by the common focus on the interaction between the Egyptian people and the divine realm, as the gods of this realm linked the Egyptian understanding of the world. As the Ancient Egyptian Religion was an integral part of ancient Egyptian society. Polytheism the belief of multiple deities usually assembled into a pantheon of gods and goddesses along with their own mythologies and rituals was an essential aspect of ancient Egyptian religion. As the Ancient Egyptian religion included a large and diverse pantheon of gods and goddesses, and around these deities arose a rich mythology that helped explain the world. As these deities of Egyptian cosmology played specific roles within the Egyptian society, as the It was their representation through artwork that communicated particular symbols and meanings within this ancient society, it must be noted that the portrayals of the gods in the art were not meant as literal illustrations of the gods, if they were visible. As the gods were believed to be mysterious, these depictions instead gave recognizable forms to these abstract deities using symbolic imagery, of animals, colour and clothing to communicate each deity’s role within this ancient society.
My father passed away in 1991, two weeks before Christmas. I was 25 at the time but until then I had not grown up. I was still an ignorant youth that only cared about finding the next party. My role model was now gone, forcing me to reevaluate the direction my life was heading. I needed to reexamine some of the lessons he taught me through the years.
Each of you here had your own relationship with my Dad, each of you has your own set of memories and your own word picture that describes this man. I don’t presume to know the man that you knew. But I hope that, in this eulogy that I offer, you will recognise some part of the man that we all knew, the man that is no longer amongst us, the man who will never be gone until all of us here have passed.
There are times when you don’t know what to do or times when you might feel like you have no help in this world, but there is always that one person who never fails to give you the best advice in life, and that is your father. I have so much respect for any father out there that works hard, and always supports his family no matter what his imperfections might be. My father has got to be the best one in my opinion. He has been the biggest inspiration in my life because he taught me so much stuff in this life that I can’t find a way to pay him. He has been a very humble person and has never seen himself better than anyone else because he believes he is equal to any other father. In my opinion he is the best even though he says he isn’t. My father had imperfections just like any other human being in this world, yet he still taught me how to be a great person in this world by teaching me good morals. “Never Give Up, and believe in God and you will accomplish what you want in life” are words my father always tells me to remember.