Eulogy

In honor of the man who graces the top of every page on this site, here is the eulogy that, I hope, celebrated his life:

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Part of Dad’s morning routine was to sit down with a cup of coffee and the newspaper and read it from beginning to end. A lot of people do that as part of their day, and reading the entire paper means reading the obituaries as well. That’s usually not done out of some morbid curiosity, it’s done because it’s simply part of the paper, part of their day, and therefore part of their life.

This past Sunday, when most people came across the name “Joseph P. White”, they probably didn’t have much reaction. You’ve got to admit, “Joe White” is a pretty bland name. Other than a former Celtic basketball player who would never be confused with Dad, there’s no one famous who shares that name. It doesn’t have a funny spelling or a unique ring to it. It’s just two syllables, the bare minimum for a full name. Joe. White.

For someone who didn’t know him, reading the text of his obituary may have led them to the conclusion that he led a forgettable life. My dad was born, spent a few years in the Army, like most people of his age, got married, got a job, had a lot of kids, retired, and a few years later, he died. The End. Other than the number of kids, which is pretty high by today’s standards, there was really nothing remarkable there.

He wasn’t born in deepest, darkest Africa, or any other exotic, far off land. He was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and grew up in Somerville, Dedham and Waltham. While those may sound like exotic places to people who haven’t been there, trust me, they aren’t.

His time in the Army was entirely during peacetime. He never heard a shot fired in anger, served the bare minimum amount of time, and then he got out and went home. The most remarkable event to take place during his time in the service was the removal of a benign cyst from his…well let’s call it his tailbone. Not very glamorous.

He married a school teacher, not a fashion model, and while his kids all turned out to be pretty respectable people, there’s nary a movie star, ballplayer, American Idol, mystery writer, governor or reality TV star among them, unless Jeannie’s big “Wheel of Fortune” win counts.

And that’s not surprising, because he didn’t have a very exciting job himself. It was a steady income, and it was perfectly respectable, but being a sales manager for a truck company isn’t exactly exciting. He wasn’t going to make any headlines checking out books for people at the library in his retirement years either.

He never lifted a car off anybody, he never saved a kitten from a house fire, he never won the Boston Marathon, or had a hit Motown single, or held public office, or flew an Apollo mission to the moon. No, the people reading that obituary would be perfectly justified if they took in that brief summary of Joe White and then immediately classified his life as forgettable, right down to his name.

Perfectly justified, and perfectly wrong.

My dad was utterly and completely memorable to everyone who knew him well. In fact, my challenge today was not to think of things that would help us all remember him. It was to keep from reciting them for the next several hours.

We’re talking about a guy who said that the cyst they removed from his tailbone was a “war wound”, always with a little twinkle in his eye.

We’re talking about a guy who pretended to be a race walker at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, right down to giving autographs to unsuspecting Japanese, who probably still possess in a place of honor his chicken scrawl signature on the presumption that it’s worth something. Occasionally I check eBay to see if any of them are for sale. I think I’d pay a half million yen for one.

This was a man who, without any warning or reason, would decide to belt out a few lines from some Harry Belafonte tune like “The Banana Boat Song”, or “Jamaica Farewell”. Or, it might have been Neil Diamond, or ABBA, or, Heaven help us, Vaughn Monroe’s so-called classic, “The Rich Maharaja of Magador”. I will spare you the trauma of my singing voice today, but rest assured that he would not. Forgettable? Hardly.

His head was so enormous that in the only year in which he served as an assistant Little League coach, even with the adjustable snaps of his hat completely undone, the thing still sat precariously on top of his head like the cap on an organ grinder’s monkey. Seeing him marching in the annual Little League’s parade with that thing threatening to slide off his skull at any moment was absolutely memorable.

This was a man who remained utterly convinced, probably until the very moment he left us, that he was going to win the lottery someday. 73-million-to-one odds? That didn’t concern him in the slightest. His optimism on this issue was absolute.

On occasion, Dad would suddenly say something in a mixture of real and phony Japanese, with just enough English spliced into it to make it understandable to my mother and no one else, leaving us kids utterly convinced that not only did Dad speak Japanese, but that Mom understood it.

He was perhaps the last living person to put piccalilli on his hot dogs. Among his other dietary favorites were bone marrow and sardines. He once, without warning, fed his children chocolate covered insects, so believe me when I tell you that we wish some of his quirks actually were forgettable.

My Dad absolutely loved going to the beach, and would dive headlong into the waves regardless of the water temperature, swimming further out to sea than anyone else. Sometimes we could only track him when his heels would pop up above the waves. If anyone wanted to take a picture of him while he was in his bathing suit, he was incapable of not flexing his bicep for the camera. For any of you who have seen those pictures, I think you’d agree that they stick in your memory, particularly the poster sized one in his basement in which the angle of the camera gives him the appearance of being nude. Thankfully, it does not give us a view of his “war wound”.

The movie “Jaws” came out when us kids were too young to see it, so after Dad saw it, he gathered us all around the kitchen table, and proceeded to give us a blow by blow description of the entire film. We all remember that as he told the story, his enthusiasm continued to rise, so that when he reached the part where Captain Quint is eaten by the shark, which was pretty much the primary reason why kids our age couldn’t see the movie in the first place, he told it in extreme detail and with glee to match it. A few years later, he did the same thing with the movie “Halloween”, as Mom sat off to the side, shaking her head.

Anyone who attended the wedding of any of his children will attest that they clearly remember the dancing display Dad and Mom put on. Not bad for a guy with a pacemaker and foot drop in one leg.

But the most concrete proof I have that Dad led a memorable life is this: About a year before she passed away, my mom’s mom, or Nana as we called her, was in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer’s. Most days, she didn’t recognize a single person she saw. We all went on vacation back to Boston in the summer of 1999, and took the time to visit her, pretty much knowing that it would be the last time we would see her. My Mom warned me before we went that Nana wouldn’t recognize me, certainly wouldn’t recognize my wife Sandy, whom she had only met once, and would have no idea who our son Sam was. We arrived at the nursing home and it was pretty much as described. I walked in and Nana clearly didn’t know who I was, the same for Sandy. She saw Sam and assumed that he was my younger brother Rich. She saw my mother and had a spark of some kind of recognition, but clearly didn’t know which of her daughters, or relatives for that matter, that she was dealing with.

Then Dad walked into the room, behind the rest of us, and when Nana looked up and saw him, she smiled, and she said, clear as a bell, “There’s Joe White”. In those last years, despite the fog of Alzheimer’s, Dad was the one person who Nana never failed to recognize. I think that makes him pretty much the definition of the word “memorable”.

Something both funny and wonderful happened at the hospital during Dad’s last day with us. Just outside the hospital entrance, a goose had decided to make her nest in some of the plants on the ground. She and her eggs were in clear view from the lobby windows, and when my daughter Katie saw this she let us know that one reason geese sit on their eggs is so that their babies won’t be born ugly. That gave us a much needed laugh, but those geese also served as a bit of a symbol for us. See, the mother goose had five eggs in her nest, and she never strayed far from them. She didn’t have to, because standing guard a few feet away, near the hospital doors, was the father goose, constantly watchful that no one would come close enough to threaten the nest.

Five young ones. A mother that stayed at home. A father protecting it all. That simple scene summed up our family very neatly, and served as the perfect reminder of how we should always remember our own protective father, particularly now that he has finally found rest.

And so, with that, all of us now say Goodbye, Dad.

Please rest now.

We know that they make a mean cup of coffee where you are, and that the doughnuts are probably almost as good as the ones you got every morning at John’s. The crossword puzzles they have must beat the pants off anything ever created by the New York Times, and you’ll never need to refill the lead in your mechanical pencil. I’m sure you can now find a Red Sox hat that will fit, that there’s plenty of piccalilli for your hot dogs, and that they’ve got great dancing every night. Heck, they’ve probably even got Vaughn Monroe himself. If you want to chat about the Red Sox, you can probably look up Ted Williams. And while they might think their garden is something special now, just wait until they’ve had you working on it for a while.

We’re sure that you now know that you really did win the lottery, just not the kind that results in a bigger bank account.

Know also that even as you now watch over us from afar, we feel blessed for the time you spent watching over us while you were here.

Know that those of us who had the privilege of calling you Joe, or Grandpa, or Sweetie, or Dad, will always remember you, and will always love you.

An Irish Blessing

May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face.
And rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.