Eulogy Examples for a Father

My dad, Frank, was not a man of grand speeches, which makes it slightly ridiculous that I'm giving one about him. If he were here, he'd already be checking his watch and muttering that the parking meter was about to run out. So Dad, I'll keep this as short as I can, which you and I both know was never my strength.

Dad spent thirty-one years as an electrician, and he approached everything in life the way he approached wiring: carefully, by the book, and with deep suspicion of anyone who claimed there was a shortcut. He read the manual. He kept the receipts. He once returned a toaster after four years because, quote, 'it said lifetime warranty, and I'm still alive.' And it worked. He left that store with a new toaster and the quiet satisfaction of a man who had been right.

But here's what you might not know about Frank the careful man: he was also the softest touch in the county. Every stray cat in our neighborhood knew which porch had the food. When I was nine and crashed my bike into his half-built fence — the fence he'd spent three weekends on — he looked at the wreckage, looked at my scraped knees, and said, 'Well. The fence had it coming.' Then he carried me inside and we never spoke of the fence again, even though it stood crooked for fifteen years because he refused to fix the section I'd hit. I think he liked the reminder.

He taught me to fish, badly — we were both terrible at it, and I think that was the point. The fishing was an excuse to sit in a boat and not talk, which was Dad's love language. Some of the most important conversations of my life happened in that boat, in sentences of five words or fewer. 'He's not good enough.' 'You'll figure it out.' And once, when I was crying about a job I didn't get: 'Their loss. Sandwich?'

Dad wasn't perfect. He could hold a grudge against a referee for a decade. He believed thermostats were a conspiracy and that 64 degrees was 'plenty warm.' He never once, in my entire life, ended a phone call with a goodbye — he'd just say 'okay then' and hang up, and you'd find out the call was over when the line went dead.

So Dad — okay then. Thank you for the crooked fence, the silent boat, the second ring. Thank you for showing me that love isn't something you announce. It's something you do, every day, with the receipts kept and the porch light on. We'll take it from here. The cats will be fed.

My father, Raymond — Ray to everyone but the tax office — had three great loves: my mother, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and arguing with the radio. Not necessarily in that order, depending on the season.

When I was growing up, Dad worked long shifts at the plant, and I mostly remember him in motion: out the door before dawn, home smelling of machine oil, asleep in his chair by nine with the game still on. For a long time I thought that was all there was — a quiet man who worked hard and didn't say much. It took me becoming a father myself to decode him. The man wasn't quiet. He was busy. Every hour of that work was a sentence in a letter he was writing to us, and the letter said: you will have it easier than I did.

He had exactly one recipe — chili, no beans, don't ask — and he made it every Sunday for forty years like it was a religious obligation. He coached my little league team for six seasons despite knowing, by his own cheerful admission, 'basically nothing about baseball.' We lost almost every game. He didn't care. He cared that every kid got an at-bat, including the ones whose own fathers never showed up. There are men at this funeral today who were eight years old when Ray decided they mattered. Some of them have told me this week. He never told me at all.

I won't pretend we never fought. We were too alike for peace — two stubborn men who each thought the other drove too fast and voted wrong. There were a couple of years in my twenties when our phone calls were short and our silences were long. What I want you to know, especially the young people here, is how it ended: it ended with him showing up at my apartment with a toolbox after I mentioned, once, in passing, that my sink dripped. That was the apology. I made him chili. That was mine. We never discussed it again and we never needed to.

Dad died the way he lived — without fuss, after checking that Mom's car had been serviced. The last thing he said to me was about tire pressure. I have decided to find that beautiful, because it was. It was him saying what he'd always said, in the only dialect he ever spoke: be safe, I love you, check the tires.

Okay, Dad. Tires are checked. Chili's on Sunday. We've got Mom. Rest now — you've earned about forty years of it.

I want to tell you one story about my dad, Walter, because I think it holds everything else.

When I was twelve, our car broke down on the highway at night, in the rain, two hours from home. I was scared. Dad got out, looked under the hood with a flashlight he kept in the glovebox for exactly this moment, and could not fix it. The great fixer of all things could not fix it. And I remember waiting for him to get angry — but instead he got back in the car, handed me half a gas-station sandwich, and said, 'Well, kid, we're having an adventure.' We sat in that car for two hours telling terrible jokes until the tow truck came. It's one of my favorite memories of my entire childhood, and nothing went right the whole night.

That was Dad's gift. He couldn't fix everything — nobody can — but he could sit with you in the broken-down moments and make them warm. He did it for Mom through her illness. He did it for his brother after the divorce. He did it for me more times than I deserved.

Dad, things are a bit broken down right now, and you're the one we'd call. So we'll do it your way instead: we'll sit close together, we'll share what we have, and we'll tell terrible jokes until the light comes. Thank you for the adventure. We love you.