Blog
23
Mar
2010
Tip of the Day: 10.03.23 Avoid eye contact with the kids
Written by Jimmy
Well, the last couple days we’ve been burying my Dad. Key tip, if you’re doing the eulogy — don’t look at your own kids. And always carry your clothes when streaking.
So, first, this wasn’t a tragic thing at all, but a celebration. My father died on 4 January after a long fought battle with arthritis — he was 84, lived a full and wonderful life and left on his own terms. We all got to tell him everything we wanted and he did the same. I have lots of friends that lost their parents way too early. This wasn’t like that. So a few things:
- He was buried with ‘full military honours‘ at Arlington Cemetary. What does this mean? It starts with a 70 person military band, at attention outside the funeral chapel. They begin to play march songs as the casket is brought into the chapel. The honour guard escorts the casket in, drapped with the US flag. There’s a chapel ceremony. Then the honour guard escorts the casket out. It is put on a caisson (originally a French word for a chest to carry ammunition, but now a term for the wagon that carries caskets, drawn by horses). There is a platoon of soldiers, led by a flag carrier who holds a flag of the deceased rank. This is followed by band, which is followed by caisson, which is followed by pall bearers, which is followed by family. They all march to the grave site. At the grave site, the band plays a song or two. Then there is a 21 gun salute (three vollies of 7 rifles), then Taps (‘Taps’ is the trumpet call that is played everytime the flag is lowered on a military base – I grew up with this all my life), then the honour guard lifts the flag off the casket and cerimonially folds it into a triangle and a soldier on bended knee hands it over to the widow (or Mother). The honour guard, platoon and band then marches off. Next to the grave is a horse, with saddle, with boots in the stirrips facing the wrong way to symbolise the fallen soldier. The family is then left with the casket for a moment. The entire service is designed so that the loved ones of the fallen soldier knows the entire nation, from President to the soldiers in honour guard is behind them, honoring their fallen son or husband. I have gone to a bunch of these ceremonies during my life, but always for older grandfathers, uncles or in this case my dad. I can only imagine what it is like for a fallen kid of 18 or 19. You don’t need to know the person being buried and you cry. So if he’s a young soldier, I don’t know how you hold it together. But the widows and Mom’s hold it together because that is their duty (more on that). We had to wait from January 4th to March 22 to bury my dad because there was so many young boys being buried from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. And thank goodness you don’t pull rank for funerals. You are buried in the order you fall. That’s way too many young boys.
- So it was full military honours with a big band, big honour guard, and we were going to have a fly by (this is a set of jets in formation roaring over the grave site. Once directly over the site, one plane veers off to symbolise the fallen pilot). My mom had organised that all of the grand children would be the pall bearers. So the service starts with all the family inside the chapel. And the honour guard brings in the ‘casket’ (my dad was cremated, so small box) and then grand kids are lined up outside as the honour guard pass thru them, with the kids holding their hands over their hearts (Kids; they are 14-38 years old). So box comes in with soldier holding box and separate soldier holding flag. And then the grand kids march in all sobbing, having just experienced this extraordinary moment. Service happens, and then we line up to march to grave site. But this starts again with us leaving the service thru the line up of grandchildren holding hands over heart, honouring their grandfather as casket comes out. The whole congregation pass thru this line of grand kids, sobbing, but tall and straight. My mom goes into a limo with older sister and most of the great grand children. The grand children line up again in formation behind the ‘caisson’ and my brother and I and two sisters decide to walk with them as well. And we are joined by the current Chief of Staff of the Airforce and his wife. They join us to walk to the site. What an extraordinary couple. And we walk. And then it starts to rain. A lot. For a mile. And no umbrellas go up amongst the grand kids. They just walk in formation. So, no umbrellas go up with brothers and sisters. And the Chief of Staff doesn’t put up his umbrella. And we simply walk thru a complete dump of rain. And the grand kids later say that they figured their grand dad would just get wet and enjoy the weather. The rain unfortunately cancels the fly by (which my dad didn’t want, so we figured Dad arranged the rain). But at gravesite, when it came time for the honour guard to hand over the triangle flag to my mom, the Chief of Staff of the Airforce steps in, and goes down on bended knee to hand the flag to my mom. And he whispers to the soldier who gives him the flag (you’re doing a wonderful job, son) and he tells my mom a lot of good things about my dad (who he knew). And we all decide we really, really like this guy. He’s General Norton Schwartz and is a class act. Final touch was mom had arranged for every person there to put a yellow rose (yellow rose for Texas) on the casket as they walked out. So we left a grave site covered in yellow roses. The grave site is very close to my Mom’s dad’s grave, her brother’s grave and a couple brothers in law. We are a military family.
- So back to the service, where I had to give the eulogy – I was of course honoured to do so, but terrified. In my job, I speak in front of hundreds of people at least 5 times a month. So I do this sort of thing all the time. But I’m one of those folks that cannot say anything ‘real’ and emotional without my voice cracking –and I just can’t talk. The day before the funeral, we had a wonderful family celebration on the Potomac river (we had all spent hours with dad white water canoeing on the river). Kathy had arranged a ceremony where we wrote little messages to dad and attached them to flowers that we threw in the river. Very cool. As I announced what we were going to do, my voice broke in just giving instructions and Kathy had to take over! This was giving instructions! I told my mom a week before that I was worried about delivering the eulogy, because I might cry. She said, ‘well then find someone else, because your father doesn’t want someone up there sobbing!’ Cheers, Mom. So now I’m really worried. We had all written the eulogy together, and actually read a lot of it to our dad in the last few days. So the issue wasn’t the words, it was just delivering them. So on the day all I could do was disengage from the first part of the funeral ceremony. I didn’t listen, and certainly didn’t think about it being for my Dad. And then I got up to deliver the eulogy, and am facing a sea of grandchildren, including my three kids, all sobbing, having just been the pallbearers! I decide they are not the folks I should be looking at. So I look around and find Donald Rumsfeld, who was Bush senior’s Secretary of Defense when my dad was in the military. He’s on the right hand side and has a steady eye and good smile. And then on the far left, I find Joy A, a family friend of my parents that I’ve known since I was a small kid! She’s beaming, all happy to see me up there. So I give the whole eulogy to Donald Rumsfeld on the right, steady, ram rod straight man and now my new best friend, and to Joy A on the far left, beaming and giggling. My eyes travel straight thru the mass o’ grandkids in the middle. I pause on my Mom every once in a while, because she’s ram rod straight like Rumsfeld. She didn’t cry a tear all day, saying that she cried inside, but needed to due her duty for Dad. And I got thru it, cracking my voice only twice. Hardest single thing I’ve ever done. I sat down and was shaking for the entire rest of service. I only re-engaged really, when I watched the Chief of Staff kneel down in front of my Mom. But thank you Secretary Rumsfeld and Joy A. I sure needed your faces.
- After all, it is all about the Music. My Song Discoveries over last couple months have been heavily influenced by all this stuff going on. My last days with Dad were New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. He would call me in to his bed room every two hours or so to deliver another story or message. He would then fall back asleep and then wake up and tell another story. You could tell he was thinking thru the final messages for us, and getting up energy to tell a story and then needed rest to prepare for the next one. All were about family, friends or key lessons about integrity, love, etc… No stories about power, professional accomplishments, etc… Interesting. All about family, friends and moments. Hmmm. This was New Year’s Day, and I decided to do a song discovery after each story. It was a very emotional day, bouncing in and out of the room. Yet the song choices included, Here Comes the Sun, Perfect Day, etc… All wonderful ‘day beginning’ music. And I closed with a lot of my dad’s favourite songs. It just seem that whole day, on New Year’s Day 2010, that he was being released, that he was starting a new wonderful chapter. On the night before the funeral, I chose I Shall Be Released by Dylan, in this case covered by Mama Cass, Joni Mitchell and Mary Travers. This song was played when we were in college morning the death of one of our class mates and has always been for us a funeral song. Uplifting, ultimately redemptive, but about loss.
- And now two stories. All my life, my Dad was involved with lots of Top Secret stuff. And he could never talk about anything he did. Above his desk was this ‘hook’ — thick metal three pronged hook. And it had something underneath that said – ‘for services to your country.’ I never knew what this was, but figured it was real important because it was the only thing on the wall in front of his desk. So in 2003, Dad sits me down and says, ‘the Corona project’ is now declassified, so I can talk to you about the hook. The Corona Project was about the first spy sattelites over the Soviet Union and Dad was in charge. They had to design the satellites and the rockets to shoot those satellites in to space (the first 7 rockets failed!). They were also using 35MM film. Which means that after they had taken a lot of pictures, they needed to inject the cannister of film and it had to survive going thru the earth’s atmosphere and then a little parachute would come out. Pilots would then fly around this parachute and try to ‘hook’ it with a bunch of hooks trailing behind their planes. If they missed, the cannister would blow itself up so the Soviets didn’t know what was going on. And as Dad told this story he said, ‘you know son, the heroes of this story were those pilots. They never one time lost a cannister and so the lights never went out over the Soviet Union.’ Now flash forward a year. We were having a X-mas party and invited an American family that had moved near by – he works with me. They said they couldn’t come because his parenets were visiting. We said invite them. His Dad was ex-Col. in US Air Force and over X-mas punch I started to tell the same story about the Corona Project, ending, thank goodness, with Dad’s words that the real heroes of this project were the pilots. At this point, my friend’s Dad then said, ‘Well did you know I was in charge of those pilots?’ So two Americans living in London 100 metres away from each other, were the sons of the two men leading the Corona Project, one designing the satellites and one ‘hooking’ the cannisters. There were probably 70 people in whole world that knew about this project! And the best part of story is that the pilots were getting together for the first time for a reunion. Dad was able to write a note to these 70 + year old hereos telling them how critical it was that all cannisters were hooked. Cool.
- The second story is much more trite, but was the story I told as we threw flowers into the Potomac. During the streaking craze in the US, I was about 13 and had four guy friends over for a sleepover, with my 18 year old sister baby-sitting. All our parents, big military types, were all at a big military ball in Mess Dress — this is all white outfits and medals. So we decide as a group of boys that we’re going to go streaking, i..e, run around naked. We targeted a girl scout troop gathering down at the local lake. So we head down there. I was the most scared of the bunch, so as I got naked, I kept my clothes with me. The others hid their clothes in bushes. Big mistake. What we didn’t know is another group of older boys had been down at the lake harassing the girl scouts, throwing rocks at windows, etc… And the Military Police had been called in. They had set up a little trap for the older boys. We didn’t know. So we go charging down to the girl scout hut naked, we run to the big window and wiggle about (we’re 13, so I doubt there was much action!) tapping on the windows while naked. And then we started to run on, but suddenly all sorts of lights when on and search lights and police lights and loudspeakers and all hell broke out. We scattered like bugs when the lights go on. I had my clothes and managed to get behind a dumpster and put my clothes on. I came out from behind it and was immediately picked up by policeman. I said I was just walking around and asked what was going on. He said some hoodlums had been around the area and he better escort me home. So he takes me home. My sister answered the door and was about to say ‘Oh you idiot, you were caught!’ I gave her a signal to shut up and she stayed quiet. The policeman dropped me off. Only after he left did we realise my trousers were on inside out! Back at the lake, my poor naked buddies were trying to smim across the lake but were followed by search lights ’til they gave up. crawling back on shored covered in duck poop. At the military ball my parents noticed that one by one parents of kids at our house were called out (to pick up kids at police station). My parents didn’t really know why and stayed at the Ball until the end. When they got home to an empty house, my sister and I told the story. My dad pulled me into the other room. He said, ‘So you were the only one not caught?’ I said, yes sir. You say yes sir to a six foot four general in military dress and medals. He held out his hand and said, ‘Well done son. Well done.’ That was my dad. (Of course, the next day things were a bit worse when he had to talk to four sets of parents that we’re not too thrilled with my sister’s baby sitting or their son’s loyalty — sort of abandoned the boys to the police and all). But for that evening, I went to bed with inside out trousers and a memory of a strong handshake and a ‘Well done son.’
For the weekend, my Mom kept talking about Jimmy’s Eulogy and even gave me a folder called ‘Jimmy’s Eulogy’ to put the paper in. I kept trying to point out that it was Dad’s eulogy, but she wanted nothing to do with that. So, I come back with to London with a little folder marked ‘Jimmy’s Eulogy.’ If it is all the same to the rest of you, let’s keep that folder empty for a while.
So never look at your kids when delivering a eulogy to their grandfather. And always carry your clothes when streaking.
Jimmy
And here’s a little video of Ceremony: