The Empty Seat: A Eulogy for my Daddy

This coming Saturday, at my daughter’s dance recital, there will be an empty seat in the audience.

I know that my father’s life and memory will teach me many lessons as the years unfold, but already his loss has taught me this one: never take a single moment or a single person for granted, because only God knows the number of our days. I purchased a recital ticket for my father just a couple of months ago. In the spring, it never entered my mind that by the summer, my Dad could be gone.

But really, he is not ‘gone’ – is he? I already miss him more than I ever imagined I would when he died, but he is not gone. There are some of us here of the Jewish faith and some of us of the Catholic faith, and that is one of the many things that our two great religious traditions teach in common – that in the afterlife, a good man is rewarded for all he did in this world. And my Daddy was a good man.

He wasn’t always an easy-to-get-along-with man, he wasn’t always a nice man, he wasn’t always a patient man. But he was a very, very good man. In fact, he was one of the best people I have ever known, and whether he knew it or not, he was my hero.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted so much to be exactly like him, and even as a teenager and young woman, when we frequently clashed, I never stopped admiring him. You know, I hope I’m even half the mother that my mother has always been, and I have never had anything but the utmost love and respect for her, but truth be told, it was always my Daddy that I emulated. Looking around now, these past couple of days, I see how many things I do because that’s the way my father did them. I drink my coffee black because that’s what my father did. I eat my steak rare because that’s what my father did. I even drive my spouse crazy because that’s what my father did.

But seriously, there were times when I thought someone saying, “You know, you’re just like your father!” was a bad thing, and now, it’s something I am so proud to hear. That’s because my father and I didn’t always get along so well. In fact, there was a time that he and I could barely be in the same room together without sparks flying. And yet somehow, in what we now know were the last years and months of his life, I am so fortunate to say that we had become very close.

In the months before he died, Dad and I talked on the phone virtually every single morning, sometimes more than once a day. We would find ourselves, around 9:30 am, in the car – he, driving to his store for work, and I, on my way to the kids’ activities or running my errands. We would talk, sometimes about important things and sometimes, really, about nothing. I never realized how much our little morning chat had come to mean to me until he got sick, and suddenly there was quite a void in my daily routine.

So, when I am tempted to be angry with God for taking Dad from us so much sooner than we expected, I have to stop myself and be grateful to God for the blessing of the time that we did have. Because if I’d had to give this eulogy 15, or 10, or even 5 years ago, I don’t think I could have. It was really only recently, as my relationship with my father evolved, that I started to see him for the man he really was, that I started to understand and appreciate him. Seeing my father through adult eyes changed things – but most of all, seeing him through the eyes of my children changed everything. He was a wonderful grandpa. My children adored him. I am so sad that he will be missing from the rest of their lives. I am so sad that he will never get to take Teresa down the crocodile slide in his lap at his timeshare in Mexico again, as he had promised her. I am so sad that he’ll never get to take the girls to the American Girl Doll flagship in Manhattan at Christmastime, as he’d promised them.

So, I said that I had, over the past few years, come to realize what a good man my father was, and I want to share with you some reflections on my Dad and some of my favorite memories of him, that will illuminate what made him so special. And now I can just hear him saying, “Oh, Kerri, give it a rest already! Just say what you have to say and get on with it, why do you always have to make such a production of everything?”

He was, first and foremost, a family man. My favorite parenting book says, “The single most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” And one certainty that I always had, one thing I never doubted for a second, was how much my father absolutely loved my mother. He adored her, and it was evident just from the way he looked at her. Throughout 35 years of marriage, through all of life’s ups and downs, anyone could look at my father and instantly see just how much he loved my mother with his whole heart – and by extension, how much he loved Jeff and me.

He wasn’t the sentimental, affectionate type, and yet he was so thoughtful, so caring, so romantic in his own way. He wasn’t the stereotypical man who forgot important dates – he always remembered birthdays and anniversaries and Mother’s Day and the like. In fact, one of the happiest days I remember was Valentine’s Day, a year or two before I met my husband. I wasn’t dating anyone that year, and come February, I didn’t think I’d be getting anything from anyone. But there at the door of my apartment was a florist with a dozen red roses for me, from my Dad.

Dad was one of the hardest-working people I know. He always told me that he wanted my brother and me to have more than he had, and he worked so hard to provide us with life’s comforts and opportunities. He had nothing handed to him – he achieved his success the old-fashioned way, by working hard and persevering. And yet, he was always there for us, he always had time for us. He managed to achieve that balance that eludes so many husbands and fathers – he worked very hard at his job, and yet he made sure that he was present for his family. My Dad got dressed up and took my mother out on dates. He never missed a school play or an award ceremony or a hockey game or a parents’ meeting or a baton-twirling recital. I knew he worked hard, but I knew we came first – I never doubted that if I needed him, he would drop everything and be there.

But my Dad wasn’t all work - my Dad was FUN! And he was funny. He had a great sense of humor. He was outgoing and gregarious; he could tell a story and have everyone captivated, he could tell a joke and have the whole room in stitches, he could tease you mercilessly, but you knew it was out of love. Now, he did sometimes overuse his jokes – occasionally Mom or Jeff or I would have to remind him that it may have been funny the first 5 times, but it was starting to get old!

But Dad was the life of the party – he knew how to have a good time. My friends all loved him. He took off his suit jacket and threw it over his shoulder and got down and boogied to hip-hop music on the dance floor at my Sweet 16 party! He would chase Jeff and me into the pool and sneak up behind us humming the “Jaws” music and then grab us and pull us under. He took us to Disney World and stayed until the park closed to see the fireworks, and then carried us, asleep, over his shoulders. He snuck me on the rides that little kids weren’t supposed to go on – even the one where I passed out in fear and he had to carry me off! He took us to Seaside and wasted dollar bill after dollar bill playing the hit-the-frog-on-to-the-lilypad game until he’d won us each a prize. He took us to sports games and let us get hot dogs and French fries and pretzels and ice cream and cotton candy until we burst! He took me parasailing over the ocean in Hawaii.

Dad was smart – not necessarily book-smart, but real-world smart: he could read people, he could influence people, he could charm people. He seemed to know what to do in every conceivable situation, how to handle any problem that arose. I called my Dad when the car broke down, I called him when the tax forms were wrong, I called him when the kids were sick, when the vacuum broke, when the alarm was going off, when the house flooded – whatever the situation was, I could call Dad and he’d know exactly what to do. He was wise.

Dad was generous. Everything he had, he shared with others. He always had little (or big!) surprises for the kids. He took great joy in doing things for those he cared about, and nothing made him happier than making us happy.

Dad, above all, was trustworthy and truthful. He was honest about his feelings and opinions, sometimes so honest that you wished he weren’t. My father believed in telling it like it is, being open and up-front, and not mincing words. Sometimes he could be curt or gruff, but you knew that if my father gave you his word, you could take it to the bank. I was thinking about it over the last couple of days, and I realized that my father never, not once, broke a promise to me. In 30 years as his daughter, I cannot recall even one single time that my father did not keep his word.

Perhaps that’s why I always believed that my father could do anything. There was no mess I could make from which he couldn’t rescue me, and believe me, I tried! Everything would be OK, as long as Dad was there. Early on the morning of my wedding, Dad picked me up at my apartment to take me to the hair salon to get ready. The sky looked ominous – it was grey and cloudy and there was so much moisture in the air. A substantial part of our wedding plans were to take place outside, and I was so scared that everything would be ruined by a rainstorm. My father looked right at me and said, “It is not going to rain on your wedding day.” And with the trust of a little girl who believed that her father was omnipotent, I said, “OK.” And when I came out of the salon, ready to leave for the church, I beheld the most gloriously beautiful, perfectly sunny and dry autumn day I could imagine. I realized that I trusted him implicitly, that I would believe anything he said, and, even though it may sound childish, in that moment I believed that my Daddy could control the weather.

The last memory I’ll share with you of my father being there for me was one of the moments I truly realized what a great man he was. When I was overdue with my third child, my husband had to go overseas for a work commitment that might have cost him his job if he hadn’t. So my parents came to stay with me – Dad made a fuss about Steve leaving and him having to put his life on hold to come out to PA – but I knew he’d be there. And sure enough, when I went into labor, Dad drove me into Philadelphia to the hospital, and as I screamed in pain, doubled over next to him, he said, “Now listen to me, if you have this baby in my car, I am sending Steve a bill for the cleaning!”

I was in labor, my husband was in Europe, and I was scared, but I knew that my Dad would not let anything happen to me or to his grandchild. We got to the hospital, and my father, who could be so grouchy and brusque sometimes, was so gentle and calming – he opened the car door for me, and he carried my bags up to the maternity floor. Over the next few hours, as I labored, I worried about him, being diabetic, sitting in the waiting room all night without any food. I sent a nurse to check on him, and she said, “I tried to tell him to go find the cafeteria, or even to go home since you’re here safely, but he said, 'no, I am not leaving until I see that my daughter and her baby are OK'.” And so he waited, and waited, and then he called Steve to tell him that he had a son.

And my Dad, as you see in the picture on your memorial program, was the first person to hold my little boy. I chose that picture for two reasons. First, simply because I like the look on my Dad’s face; to me he looks happy, content, natural, peaceful. But more poignantly, we didn’t know it at the time the photo was taken, of course, but it’s turned out to be a picture of one man at the very beginning of his life, and one man at the very end of his life, sharing a moment that seems to bridge this world and the next. And to me, that’s a reminder of the goodness of God, the promise of eternity, and the unbreakable bond of family.

My world felt fundamentally changed the moment my mother told me that Dad had died. He was the foundation, the firm and solid rock that I knew I could count on no matter what. As long as he was alive, I believed that I would be safe from anything the world could throw at me. Dad was there; Dad could make anything right. And now, my world feels just a little bit shaky, a little bit unsure. I miss his laugh, I miss his wit, I miss his wisdom, I miss the sense of security that he gave me, I just miss his presence.

And so, this Saturday at the recital, and at all the recitals, and the sporting events, and the school plays, and the graduation ceremonies, and the holiday dinners to come, there will be one very empty seat that cannot be filled by anyone else, because there is not, and never will be, anyone quite like my Dad. And while many of us might have said that Dad could be difficult to live with, I think we are all going to find that he is even more difficult to live without.