Via Indianapolis

I’m at the Indianapolis airport right now, waiting for a flight home. I’m here because yesterday was my dad’s memorial service. He died a week earlier, after a week in the hospital because of an unexpected and fast-spreading bacterial infection. This is my second trip to Indiana in as many weeks, though if you’d told me it had been days, or months, I’d believe you. I’ve barely known where I am, a lot of the time.

My dad wasn’t religious, and he didn’t want a traditional funeral. He didn’t want to be buried, but a lot of his end-of-life directives came in a rush, when my mom asked him before he went into emergency surgery what he wanted. (He said he’d like his ashes scattered “somewhere pretty.” We haven’t even gotten them back yet, so that will have to wait.) So the service we put together was intended as a celebration of him and the things he loved in life. We had deep dish pizza and karaoke and told long stories from his life. It was nice, mostly, but on another level it made no sense. I couldn’t help but think about what a great time he would have had if he had been there. I want to tell him about it right now. “Dad, yesterday I went to Indianapolis and all of your friends were there, from your college roommate to the other old hippie dude you started hanging out with a few years ago because you and he both wrote cranky letters to the editor of the newspaper, and we had as much Lou Malnati’s pizza as you could eat, plus the cupcakes mom made for your birthday each year, and everybody talked about their favorite memories of you, and then we opened it up to karaoke before everybody sang ‘In My Life’ together. Even your brother, who none of us had seen in decades, was there!” It would have been one of his favorite days of his life. But, of course, that’s not how this works. Maybe at some point, the sweetness of a memory that he would have loved will overwhelm the bitterness of the day he missed, but I’m not at that point yet.

My brother, my sister, and I have been playing a game the past few days where we try to decide if there’s a way he might have died that would have been better than a surgery he never woke up from. Maybe if it had happened not just unexpectedly, but suddenly—if he’d had a heart attack and we’d woken up to learn not that he was going to the doctor, then to the ER, then to surgery, but that he was just gone, all at once. Maybe if it had been slow, so we’d had a year or more to say goodbye, to mourn gradually, until his eventual passing would have brought relief that it was over. I’ve been infatuated over the past few days with the idea of him contracting a terminal cancer that gave him, say, three months to live, where we’d get to spend that time talking every day and saying goodbye, sharing moments of connection and whatever lessons he thought I should have before he went, gently, one night in his sleep. It’s all nonsense, of course—you never get to pick, and none of them would have been easier. They just would have been different.

But that’s where I’ve been over the past few days, grieving in roundabout ways and still indulging some magical thinking. It’s easier than accepting that he’s gone, and he won’t be back.

At the service yesterday, I read a eulogy for him. I’m sharing it below, mostly so that it has a place to live on the internet for any friends or family who want to read it, but also because I want you—whoever you are, even if you just signed up for this newsletter for Olive Garden jokes—to know something about my dad, too. Nothing makes this easier, really, but talking about him helps a little, or at least it doesn’t make anything feel worse. Right now, that’s about all I can hope for.

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The first thing my dad would want you to know is that he qualified for Jeopardy. 

It was only a few years ago. He had to pass an online test, and then traveled to Chicago for an in-person qualifier. If you know much about my dad, you might know that getting out of the house to go somewhere he’d have to find parking, and maybe fight a crowd, was something he avoided. But he loved Jeopardy. 

I learned a lot from my dad, and most of those things can’t be answered in the form of a question. But so many of my memories of him revolve around watching the show. When I was a kid, I’d watch in awe at how someone could know so many of the answers. When I got older, I’d play along with him as we watched, and try to learn answers myself so I could compete. I still remember how proud I was when he asked me how I knew to answer “Who was Man Ray?” in a category about 20th century art. My dad was never shy about telling you he was proud when you did something, and there was a validation in knowing I had impressed him while playing Jeopardy. 

So he went to the Jeopardy qualifier, and he was surrounded by a couple hundred smart people, many of whom had traveled from farther away than he had in order to take their shot at being on the show. Most of them didn’t make it—of the 200 people who showed up, only 22 qualified. He was so proud of that. He played a mock game, met the clue crew, and got put on a list of potential candidates for the 2015 and 2016 seasons. 

He never got the call, but I think that was a relief to him. To understand my dad, you need to know that he didn’t really need to be on Jeopardy. He needed to know that he could have been on Jeopardy, that the only thing that separated him from the people he was watching on TV was that they got the phone call after they qualified, and he didn’t. The important thing to him was to know that he was good enough. Whatever happened after that didn’t matter so much. 

This was how he was about a lot of things. He had ambitions, but he was never terribly invested in what would become of them. He was a creative person at heart—he would write a verse or two of a country song that came into his head, but stop before he got to the chorus, and he never learned to play an instrument to actually complete it. He’d come up with what he was sure was a brilliant money-making idea, but felt no need to actually try to go into business printing whatever bumper sticker or t-shirt he came up with. It was enough to know that he could. One of the things I learned from my dad is that you don’t get to dictate what happens, or how the things you try will turn out—so what ultimately matters is how you decide to feel about them. 

If you followed him on Facebook, you’ve probably seen him brag about his family—he loved to talk about my nephew Griffin’s successes on the track, or my brother’s growing family, or whatever thing I had done recently that he thought was cool—and I’ve come to realize that his pride in all of that was another way that he got the sort of quiet validation that he enjoyed. I grew up hearing about his college friends who played drums for Stevie Nicks and Peter Gabriel, or the one who wrote a hit song for Randy Travis. He liked to think of himself as a journeyman baseball player, someone who might not stick with a team for long, but who could be dropped into the starting lineup and get on base most nights. 

Now that he’s gone, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to take satisfaction in knowing that you could have done something. I know that my dad lived with some regrets, but I don’t think that he died with many. I don’t think he had unfinished business or unrealized dreams. He was content to be recognized by his friends and family. His greatest ambition, in his last few years, was to bring a smile to their faces by posting something clever on Facebook. He did that a lot.

Here’s one of my favorites: If Olivia Newton-John married Wayne Newton, divorced him and married Elton John, she’d be Olivia Newton-John Newton John. I don’t know where he found this bit, but there was a little joke factory in the back of his mind that churned them out throughout the day for decades. He had that kind of brain—one that stored trivia that he was always ready to answer in the form of a question, or that collected the achievements of his friends and family, or that relished finding a new bit of wordplay. 

These were the consistent things in my dad’s life. Other things were a bit more transitory.

He grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. His dad—my grandfather—was an immigrant who came to the U.S. from England as a teenager. My dad came along when my grandfather was older, in his forties, the second of my grandparents’ two sons. He had a lot of fond memories of his childhood, and he passed those memories down to his own kids. We grew up hearing about the glories of New York—Drake’s coffee cakes, Sabrett hot dogs, the Brooklyn Dodgers. When The Wonder Years was on TV, we would watch it, and he’d re-live a little bit of being a younger brother growing into a teenager in the 1960’s. We would hear stories about his first job, working for my grandfather’s diaper delivery service—a job he started when he was eleven, when he’d accompany the drivers on their rounds as a runner, and then as he got older, driving the truck himself. We’d learn how his grandmother babied him and doted on him, and how my grandfather would take them on family drives, where he’d imagine himself a gangster using his family as cover before he’d pull off a bank heist—even if would only ever go inside the bank and take a few mints out of the candy dish. 

He went to college in Ohio, hated it, and transferred to Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky after two years. Being a kid whose dad went to college at a place called “Transylvania” was very exciting, but it meant even more to him. He made the best friends of his life there, got into adventures, and formed memories that he was all too eager to share with his kids. He told us about hitchhiking from rural Kentucky on his way to Atlanta, and how he got picked up on an off-ramp by a car full of guys who, it turned out, were also heading to Atlanta. As they rode together, he learned that not only were they all headed to the same city—one of them was the brother of the roommate of the person he was traveling to visit, so they were all going to the same house. He loved that story, loved little serendipities and huge coincidences alike. He told us about dropping acid and sneaking into the University of Kentucky football field to crawl around on the AstroTurf. He would pine for the burgers and fries at the Columbia Steak House in Lexington, declaring them the best in the world. He gushed about them to the point that, the first time I visited the city, it was the first place I went. (They were pretty great!) 

He loved to declare superlatives. The deep dish pizza at Gino’s East in Chicago—the best pizza. The pork tenderloin at Edwards’ Drive-In in Indy—the best pork tenderloin. His ophthalmologist—the best eye doctor in Indiana. Jake Arietta in 2016—the best pitcher of all time. It was a thrill to introduce him to things, with the hope that it might make the list. When he came to visit me in Austin, I took him to a diner named Kerbey Lane and we ordered the chips and queso. He took a few bites, then looked at me. “This is the best queso I’ve ever had.” I’m still proud of it. That was another thing I learned from him: That you get to decide what greatness is in your own life, and you can seek it out on your own terms. 

He could be mercurial, too. For most of my life, his color was purple. It was a remnant from his hippie days, when he would tie-dye his t-shirts that color. He had purple towels and a purple bathmat in his bathroom. If we had a choice of color for something we were picking out for him, we’d pick purple. It wasn’t even a question. Then, a few years ago, he decided that he was done with purple. He preferred red now. His favorite food was onion rings, until it wasn’t. 

He did the same thing with sports teams. When I was little, he was endlessly devoted to the Chicago Bears. He posed for a photo for a fake magazine cover with eye black on and a jersey, with the headline “Jim Solomon wins Super Bowl for Chicago Bears!” A few years later, he lost interest. A few years after that, he was such a fervent Notre Dame fan that he bought a new TV just to watch them play in the Orange Bowl. I didn’t even remember that story until my brother reminded me about it a few weeks ago, his love affair with the Fighting Irish was so fleeting. He got hopelessly invested in his beloved Butler Bulldogs basketball team during the school’s runs in the NCAA tournament a few years ago, but that faded too. Even the Chicago Cubs—the only cause that ever moved him to get a tattoo on his body—lost his favor in recent years, after they traded away Baez, Bryant, and Rizzo. 

It made it impossible to pick out a Christmas present for him. You could find something you thought was perfect, but then you’d learn that he had already moved on. But now that he’s gone, I see this a little differently. For those of us he loved forever, that meant you were something really special to him. You were up there with Muhammad Ali and The Beatles. 

This was another thing I learned from my dad: You don’t have to be tied forever to how you used to define yourself. He was never a fairweather fan—he loved the Cubs as much when they were terrible as he did during their World Series run—but he had a seasonal approach to life. When you feel like the season for onion rings or Notre Dame has passed, it’s time for the next one. 

And he usually found new things to care about instead. He was a devoted music fan his whole life. I grew up listening to Breakfast with the Beatles on Sunday mornings on the radio. He introduced me to jazz and Neil Young. He loved Southern boogie rock—he saw the Allman Brothers in concert more than any other band—and we would trade tapes when I was younger, playlists more recently. We didn’t always have the same taste, but then a few years ago, when he had a job driving Medicaid patients to their appointments, he discovered that he could pick up the college radio station from Bloomington in his car, and he spent a year getting into indie rock. 

One of my favorite memories of my dad was about ten years ago, when he and my mom came to visit me in Texas. He had told me about how he’d been listening to hip young bands—Fleet Foxes and Death Cab for Cutie—and I decided to surprise him with tickets to the taping of an episode of Austin City Limits. Like I mentioned, he hated crowds and dealing with the hassles of parking, so he was suspicious when I told him I’d gotten us concert tickets for the evening. He asked me, “What concert?” and I told him “Fleet Foxes.” His eyes got wide. “That’s my favorite band,” he said. I don’t remember much about the show—it’s on TV, you can watch it if you want—but I remember sitting there with him while he clapped and cheered along with all the twenty-five year olds in the crowd, and feeling so much joy from him. 

That’s something else I learned from my dad—from both of my parents—that I’ve tried to make a core to who I am: When you find something that does it for you, embrace that feeling. There’s nothing cooler than loving the things you love. 

Last year, he spent an hour or two every week writing down stories from his life, sharing his views on life and death, and listing the things he loved most. At the end of the year, my sister had it bound in a book for her kids. Here’s what he had to say about mortality, and the most recent lesson I learned from him. 

“Here is what I believe about the afterlife,” he wrote. “We are raised in the womb. We are warm, secure, and comfortable. Some of us have our journey cut short. Others are abused. Yet most of us are safe in the womb and don’t want to leave. But we have to do it. Many psychiatrists believe that birth is the most traumatic experience in life. So we leave the womb and come into this world. We don’t remember being in the womb. Is it not the same with life? We come to be comfortable, warm, and secure, for the most part, and don’t want to leave. I believe that we transition to another phase after death, and will not recall this world at all—but like our lives here on Earth, it will be okay.”

I’ve been having a hard time this week fully absorbing that lesson. But I know that I’m so lucky that I got to love my dad, and be loved by him. I’m so lucky to have you all here with us today, to hear your memories of him, to get to know him in new ways from your stories, and to find new things to learn from, even though he’s gone. I’ll miss him every day, forever, just like he missed his own parents. But I know that he’s right, too: It will be okay.