Today would have been my father’s 69th birthday. It’s so strange that he’s gone now; he’s been dead for just under four months.

In those four months, I’ve become startled at just how frequently I’ve wished I could call him for advice, or to share something with him that he would have found funny or amusing, or to talk to him about what was happening in the world. It was far, far more frequent than I’d had the same urge while he was alive; some of this might be due to the absolutely packed news schedule that has happened since his death, between the ouster of Kevin McCarthy, the Speakership fight, the Israeli-Gazan war, the death of Henry Kissinger (and I’m still bitter that he managed to outlive my father), the ongoing election shenanigans, and much more. But most of it was due to just….not having him around anymore. And there’s so much I wanted to ask him.

I’m reposting my thoughts on his funeral, and the eulogy I wrote for him, so that I’ll never have to go digging through the Facebook timeline again for it. I found it on October 15th, 2023.

We buried my father yesterday.

I was taken aback by the people who came out to the funeral. In addition to the family members, both well-known and distant, there were several coworkers who came to pay their respects. Some had worked with my father for years; at least one had only known him for six months, and yet my father had made enough of an impact on him for him to show up at the funeral.

He explained that he’d always had trouble interacting with people in public, but that my father always made him feel at ease.

People, above all else, remember how you make them feel. That’s something that you need to keep in mind, in your dealings with other people. This is something my father knew in his bones; I learned, at the funeral, that he had been bullied relentlessly as a child, something he never spoke about, but which must have hurt him deeply when he saw me suffer some of the same struggles as a child. I wanted to include these aspects for added contexts before posting my eulogy for him, which was written before I was aware of these crucial elements.

Eulogy For My Father

This last week has been so surreal. Those of you who knew my father well, know that he was perpetually late, sometimes by hours. How is it, then, that he’s so early for this?

He was a…challenging father to have. I could never rely on him to be on time, and he had a temper that made my childhood and teenage years far more stressful than they should have been. We clashed, frequently, and I became obsessively fearful for a time.

But I never had any doubt that he loved me. He radiated love, as easily as he breathed. He would remind me of it daily, and, once I moved out, with every conversation. After I stopped living with him, the tension drained out, the intertwined stresses of a young man stretching his wings and finding himself, and whatever demons he wrestled with in his head no longer raging in the background. He gave me space to recover, though I know it grieved him to do so; he was a man who burned far too many bridges, but I always got the impression that he mourned their destruction, and didn’t quite know any other way to be.

He was, as I have been reminded many times, a man deeply constrained by his limitations, but within those limits, he was as great a parent as it was possible for him to be. Of his three children, I take after him the most, in mannerisms, in spirit, and in the challenges I face. We share so many of the same limitations and blind spots, but I had indispensable advantages that my father could simply never match.

The first was forty-odd years of scientific, medical, and educational advancements; the child who was once simply written off as weird or “the way he is”, now had ADHD, had autism, things that could be treated or supported or accommodated for. Services were put in place, infrastructures built, if someone had parents who had access to them, fought for access to them.

My father fought for me. I’ll never know how much support his father managed to get him; everyone involved in that exchange is gone, now, gone and buried. But I know it would have been far less than what my parents secured for me, because when my father needed that support, it simply hadn’t been discovered yet, implemented yet, and there wasn’t yet a culture of seeking that sort of help.

My father helped, in his tiny little corner of the world, build that culture. He expected that the schools he sent his children to would support them, he jumped through whatever hoops were placed there, he got angry on our behalf when officials might have liked to drag their feet.

And he strove to teach me the painful lessons that I only learned with time, came from long, painful, bitter experience. A man who struggled with judgement calls strived to teach his son to stop and seek wisdom. A man who experienced bitter loneliness tried desperately to keep his son from the same pain, keep a boy from burning bridges he couldn’t even see yet.

He had a big heart, and valued that in others. For someone who so struggled to manage his own affairs, he thrived when someone else needed him for something. Nothing seemed to make him happier—or at least, more fulfilled—than when I came to him with a problem he could solve. When I needed some sort of technical support, or help with a physical task, he would seem to…brighten up, almost blossom a bit, and he’d spend hours on end installing a game or building something for me. His last gift to me was a pair of prized flight sticks in my little gaming nook—he didn’t get them for me, but he did drive up, twice, to assemble and mount them, because I’d never quite managed to get the hang of tools, or the fine motor control needed to put together fiddly little objects, or the spatial reasoning to follow the little printed instructions, which would reduce me to tears of frustration.

My father once shaved his beard. I’m not sure why; some solidarity thing, I think. When he showed up to pick me up for our dinner out, I took one look at his face, and then my gaze wrenched straight downward. I’d never seen him without a beard, outside of some old photographs, and my mind simply refused to process an image of him without it. There’s was a cognitive dissonance there that I just couldn’t overcome. I spent that entire night completely unable to look at him, something he found very funny.

I feel that way again now—my mind struggles to process the fact that he’s gone. A part of me refuses to accept it; his stride, his smile, his voice, are all too vividly ingrained in my mind to accept that they aren’t here any more, that I’ll never see or hear them again outside of recordings.

I keep seeing a news story and thinking that I should share it with him, that he would love to read or hear it. I keep imagining his gleeful tone of voice at developments he finds amusing or exciting, that special, intense energy that he carried with him in his voice and his movements. When I get excited enough, I feel it too, in me—a piece of him that I’ll have to carry on alone, now.

For a host of reasons, one being that he never found it easy to talk about his challenges, and he had a tendency to deny them—I rarely spoke to him about the difficulties we share, or any insights he may have had in overcoming them. I regret that, now; I’ll never get the chance to ask for whatever wisdom he could offer.

And I’ll never be able to show him that I’ve overcome our challenges. He told me, more than once, that the American Dream was that your children would be better and more successful than you are, and he loved nothing more than reveling in the triumphs of his children. His voice would rise in pitch—“That’s great, Jonathan!”—and that energy would be there. That pride, that love, that he radiated as easily as he breathed—I’ll never be able to just bask in it again. I’ll never be able to share any successes with him, or go through any of life’s milestones with him there to enjoy watching me grow.

I have to move onward without him, and hope that the time I had with him, the lessons I learned from watching him, will be enough.