Terry's Eulogy
Thank you all for coming and thank you for all the love and support you have shown our family.
Before I begin I would like you to take a second and have you look to
your left and right and see the people gathered around you. You
will recognize some and many others you will not. Dad played a
role in the lives of many: family, friends, church and professional
colleagues; and all had a unique perspective on our father.
Our lives are like mosaics comprised of many tiles that are made from our experiences, people, places we have visited along the way. My father was just one of those tiles, but I know that he was a very bright and shiny one in your mosaic.
Yet you only had a small window into his life from each of your perspectives and I would like to take a few minutes to open a bit more of his life to you, and share with you some of the aspects of my father that you may not know.
My father would want me to begin his eulogy with a mention of my
mother. For 44 years they served each other dutifully. Truly
in health and certainly in sickness they remained steadfast in their
love and fidelity. In the beginning my father was the rock upon which
my mother used to build their future together and in his final years my
mother was the rock my father clung to for love, compassion and care and
he always found it unfailingly. He loved her dearly and she was his
guardian angel.
We do not choose our parents, it is by a mere accident of birth that my
brothers and I wound up with the parents we have; and we thank God
everyday for that . As I have grown older, I have come to
realize that many of those around me were not that fortunate. In
fact many of you here desperately wanted to have a father like ours and
many of you used my father as the role model you did not have. He
was a man of honor, integrity, character and love. He was a man on
whom you could rely and trust, his word was his bond. Old soldiers
have a saying, that the best of men are ones you can trust with your
life, your wife and your wallet, and he most certainly was all of these.
I also thank God that my father never placed the burden of racism or
bigotry around our necks, my father believed in seeing the forest for
each tree as they stood as God intended them to be. He once
remarked to me that there was already enough hate in the world, the Lord
did not need us to add to it.
My father was physically a smaller man, but he was not bound by his
physical stature. My father had character that filled a room.
He did not need to be over six feet tall to command respect in a room,
he had merely to speak. He was a man whose size was marked by the
size of his mind and heart and they were very large indeed.
All of the character traits that made him a great father made him a
great son and brother by birth and marriage. He became a man that
filled his father with pride and endeared himself to his siblings,
family and friends. Many of the character traits that made my
father a man worthy of respect and praise came from his own father:
honor, integrity, fairness, character.
All of you knew my father in different roles. Because my father was also
a humble man, you may not know truly extraordinary was his service to
our great nation. He was drafted into the Army in 1961 and served
as an infantry soldier for his mandatory 2 years. However brief was his
time in the Army, it made an enormous impact on him as a person.
The Cuban missile crisis marked his tenure as a private in the Army and
the Soviet Union would play a dark and foreboding role in the world for
much of his professional adult life.
Many of you may not know that my father was a wonderful actor and
singer, and that he had always fantasized about a life in theater or on
the big screen. He would have made it big, but he was always
a man of responsibility and the small feasts and great famines that mark
the early life of actors was not a gamble he would make with his young
family. Rather he went to work in the government as a GS1, a rank
so low that they don’t even have it anymore! It was far from
glamorous and he would never make it big or rich, but he would provide
for his family. He traded in the marquee for the harsh realities
of night school and drudgery. This however was only the beginning.
Eventually through hard work, ambition and talent, my father skyrocketed
through the ranks of government service. He had risen to the rank
of Senior Executive Service, the civilian equivalent to a General
Officer by his early 40s. Not a bad climb through the ranks. To
put that in perspective, I am now 40 and only a Major in the army.
After 33 years of helping to thwart the communists, my father opted to
go back to school and get a second master’s degree to become a middle
school teacher. He once quipped that he chose the eighth grade
because it was the last best chance to reach a kid before he became a
hardened criminal. As with most things he was absolutely correct
and hundreds of children in our area benefited from his decision to
teach them.
This may be the most important take away from my father’s eulogy.
I have had the fortune in my 21 year career to work with some of the
finest minds our country has to offer in the military, government
service, industry and academia. My father still ranks as one of
the smartest men I have ever met. Let us not forget that my father had a
singularly great intellect. He was a strategic thinker and his
analytical abilities were extraordinary. The characteristics that
made my father the man that each of us loved in respected was largely
due to his unfailing faith in Christ.
In a world that scorns religion and dismisses faith as folly and fairy
tales, we should remember that "wise men still seek Him", and my father was
certainly a wise man. For much of my life I was a man whose faith
was shaken and the hatred in this world made me question the existence
of God much less a belief in Christ. Yet I saw that my father with
his keen intellect and great analytical power still believed
unfailingly. I asked myself Why? I would implore you to do
this as well. My father’s faith was not an act, it was real, it
defined him and sustained him. If my father made any impact in
your life at all, bear in mind that it was his faith in Jesus that made
up a large part of his disposition. He would want you to know
this, because in the end we will arrive at the same place you see at the
foot of the altar. He would want you to be with him in the next
life.
My father was a Christian and he lived by those tenets. He was nobility
and charity in action. My father once adopted an immigrant family
from Cambodia as they fled from the horrors that followed the fall of
Vietnam. He found them housing, jobs and even made sure that their
first Christmas in America was one marked by presents under the tree and
why Christmas was so important for him and for them.
He was ever the Good Samaritan, helping total strangers in need when he
passed by them in life. Rescuing stranded families on the side of
the road offering a hand when and where it was needed. He did not
do these things so that I could stand here and say how great and
wonderful a man he was. He did those things, because it was what
Christ would have wanted him to do.
In the end, my father was miserable, truly miserable. His life was
a drudgery of pain and suffering to one degree or another. Yet he
never complained. He did not let himself wallow in self pity or
whine woes me. He did not blame God, or bad genes or bad karma- it
just was what it was. He sad to me “How can I ask God to give more
than he already has. I have won the lottery in life. I have
a loving wife, loving children; I had loving parents that provided well
for me and a career that put a roof over our heads and food in our
stomachs. The Lord has blessed me in so many ways; I cannot in
good conscience ask him for more.” We would all do well to
remember this when we remember my father.
He was my father and my best friend, and I will miss him terribly, but I know we will see him again.