Eulogy for My Father

Before I begin I would like to thank all of you here on behalf of my mother, my brother and myself, for your efforts large and small to be here today, to help us mark my fathers passing.

I am honoured to be here.

I am honoured to be here to speak to you all.

I am honoured to be here to speak to you about my father.

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.

My father was raised in the in-between generation, born in the years immediately before the end of World War Two, what they call the “silent generation”. A generation with one foot firmly planted in the 1940′s with the other placed unsteadily in the 1960′s. He was blessed, or some would say cursed, with an independent wife, one with the expectation of working and not content to be kept at home. His children were raised in the sixties and seventies, challenging times for parents with the traps of drug use and pre-marital sex, neither of which I believe Dad had been prepared for in the lesson plan his father had given him.

At times my Dad would be presented with the need to cope with a behaviour from my brother or I that he didn’t have an pre-made answer for, one that he would just have to cope with on the spot.

When my Dad was in this situation he always fell back on the core values that he had learned and tried to impress on us boys the importance of doing the right thing. My Dad didn’t read books about child-rearing, he relied on common sense values. My Dad didn’t know who Dr Spock was and would have thought he was an ass if he did.

One school vacation I recall my father pulling me out of bed early one morning after I had been at a party at my brother’s flat at Okareka. He asked me if I had been drinking and driving.