Eulogy Examples for Grandpa

My grandfather, Walter Briggs, was not a man who said 'I love you' very often. By my count, he said it to me three times in thirty-four years. But he changed the oil in my first car every season for six years, drove forty minutes to do it, and never once let me pay for the filter. It took me until embarrassingly recently to understand that those were the same sentence.

Grandpa Walt worked thirty-one years as a machinist at the Hartman plant on Delaware Avenue, and he ran his garage at home like a second shift. Everything in it hung on a pegboard with its outline traced in black marker, and if you borrowed the 9/16 wrench and put it back on the half-inch hook, you heard about it. We all heard about it. At the reception later, ask my cousin Danny about the Great Socket Incident of 2003 — Danny is forty-one now and I believe he is still not allowed near the toolbox.

He was a quiet man, but he was not a soft touch, and I don't want to remember him as one. He had opinions about how a man should shake hands, how early you should be — which was twenty minutes, always — and whether anything made after 1985 was built to last. It was not. He could be stubborn to the point of comedy: he kept a 1979 Ford pickup running for four decades mostly, I think, out of spite. When it finally died, two springs ago, he stood in the driveway with his cap off, like it was a service, and Grandma had the good sense not to laugh until she got inside.

But here is the thing about quiet men: when they do speak, you remember it word for word. When I was sixteen, I wrecked that very pickup backing it into a gatepost. I was shaking when I called him. He came out, walked around the truck one time, and said, 'Well. The post had it coming.' Then we fixed the fender together, all afternoon, and somewhere between the sanding and the primer he told me about the time he drove his own father's car into a creek in 1958. I had known him my whole life and never heard that story. The garage was where he kept his stories — you just had to be holding sandpaper to hear one.

Grandpa taught me to fish, to drive a stick shift, and to measure twice. He also taught me — without ever putting it this way — that showing up is the whole job. He came to every game I played, including away games, including the season I sat the bench. He sat through two of my school plays, and Grandpa Walt was not a theater man. When I asked him why he came, he said, 'Because you were in it.' That's the cleanest description of love I expect to hear in my lifetime.

He was married to my grandmother, June, for fifty-eight years, and the last thing he did every night was check the locks and turn off the porch light — except Fridays, when he left it on for whichever grandkid might roll in late. Grandma, we'll take care of the locks now. And we're leaving the porch light on, Grandpa. You taught us that, too: somebody might still be on their way home.

Everyone in this room has heard at least one of Papa Joe's stories, and most of you have heard them several times, because Papa never let a good story go just because he'd already told it. The fish from Lake Erie got bigger every summer. The winter of '77 got colder every time. And his account of meeting my grandmother at a dance hall in Toledo gained a new and unverifiable detail roughly every five years. By the end, the band had stopped playing when she walked in. Grandma swears the band did no such thing. I choose to believe Papa.

Joseph Marino was the son of immigrants, the first in his family to finish high school, and a mail carrier in this town for thirty-six years. He knew every dog on his route by name, and most of their birthdays. After he retired, he couldn't stop walking the route — he just did it without the bag, every morning, rain or shine, stopping to talk to anyone in a front yard. It took him two hours to walk what should have taken forty minutes. That was the point.

Papa had exactly one recipe — Sunday sauce — and he guarded it like a state secret while also telling everyone the entire recipe, loudly, every time he made it. The secret, he would announce, was the extra garlic. Papa, everyone knew. It was never a secret. The kitchen smelled like it from the front porch. We just loved hearing you tell it.

I want to be honest about him, because he was honest about himself. Papa was a terrible loser at cards, a worse winner, and he never in his life admitted to being lost in the car — we were always 'taking the scenic route,' including, memorably, for ninety minutes in Pittsburgh in 1998. He sang too loud at church. He cried at every wedding, every graduation, and at least two commercials that we know of. He was not embarrassed by any of it. He was the least embarrassed man I ever met, and growing up next to that kind of freedom was a gift I'm only now learning to unwrap.

When I was in college and homesick, Papa wrote me letters — actual letters, in mail-carrier handwriting, every single week for four years. Most of them were about nothing: the tomatoes, the neighbor's new fence, the Lions breaking his heart again. I have all of them in a shoebox, two hundred and some letters about nothing, which I now understand were two hundred and some letters that all said the same thing: you are not forgotten, you are loved, somebody is thinking about you on an ordinary Tuesday.

So here's how we say goodbye to a storyteller: we keep telling them. The fish gets bigger. The winter gets colder. And the band — I'm sorry, Grandma — the band absolutely stopped playing when you walked in. We love you, Papa. Save your stories. We'll want to hear them all again.