On Sunday January 24, 2016, at 4:22 pm, I received a text message from my sister; it said just this: "He's gone." My grandfather had died at the age of 93, twelve days after his birthday. He was a Master Mechanic; he was awarded a Silver Star for gallantry in action against the enemy during the first wave of the Invasion of Normandy by Allied Forces; he was a careful and dedicated gardener; he was a hard worker. When we talked he never asked me "How's work?" but "Are you working?" He knew I was working, he knew I had a job, but he always asked me like that, as if I wasn't, or as if I could stop working. So, when my aunt, and then my father, asked me to prepare a Eulogy for his funeral I started thinking about his legacy, mainly the work ethic he exemplified, the lessons I tried to learn from his example, and that's where I started. I was deeply honored that I was asked to speak on his memory--I loved my grandfather deeply. And I'm also glad I finally got to read in front of him at least one time.
When my dad asked me to write something for this day, I admit I hesitated. He said, look, you're a poet, you know? Let the words flow through you. And my first thought was, well, you're a mechanic, why don't you build me a car right here? But he was calling me to work. He understands, even if I don't, that my trade is poetry and the work should be second nature to me. And he's right. A poem is a made thing, like a car, or a greenhouse, a garden, or even a child, and it requires planning, careful measurement. A poem has, like any made thing, its technical considerations, its form and function, something to do which is why you made it in the first place.
For my part I try to make poems that have purpose, which are not made for their own sake, but poems that bear a load, that do work.
You might ask yourself why I'm talking about poems right now and not my grandfather. But I am talking about my grandfather. A poem, like a life, is held together not with glue, or screws, or nails, but with memory and imagination. And the legacy my grandfather leaves behind him is a legacy of making, of giving the world useful things it didn't already have. His sons, mechanics. One of his daughters made people beautiful, one of them makes people healthy.
However much I might wish I could turn my hand to working metal or wood into useful wonders, it's poems that I've learned to make, and throughout that making I always tried to emulate my grandfather. I always want to make poems that he would approve of, because unlike mine, his concerns were practical--he cared about interest rates, and gas mileage, and rules. It's a world where you wouldn't think poems might fit well, but I wanted them to be carefully crafted none the less, according his to standards.
However practical he was, you have to believe a man who loved gardening as much as he did had a huge capacity for hope, and to hope, you must be able to imagine unlikely outcomes.
I want us all to think about the wild imagining a young man has to do to support his family after his father dies in the dead center of the Great Depression. Or what kind of imagination is required to picture yourself safely home at the end of a war, even though your transport vessel has been blown to hell and half your comrades along with it. You might think it's sheer will power that brought my grandfather home but I insist he had to imagine his future wife's fragrance and warm embrace, the inevitable sounds of a house full of children, the green opening of sprouts in the vegetable garden reaching for the Sun.
Every life is an act of imagination, more than an act of will or obligation. Our lives are held together by desire, hope, our plans to do better, and finally, love.
The best parts of my grandfather's life can still be found in the hearts of the everyone here today. He lives on in our memory, in every act of kindness, every small repair we make to add life and purpose to some broken but useful thing.
I contribute these memories to this day: One day not long ago, my grandfather got a new pair of hearing aids. He said, "Mikey, I can hear birds singing for the first time in thirty years." Can you imagine living without the daily chatter of robins in the yard? I can't, I don't know how he did it. I'll never forget how he called Amanda my wife long before she ever was. I'll never forget how I felt more grown-up than ever when he talked to me about my own garden, and I'll never forget his genuine, honest affection and deep love for all of his grandchildren. He's a man to model one's self after. We could ask for no better, we were so lucky to have him here with us.
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