thanate | funeral

Despite stupid lunchtime traffic with a YELLING BABY in Ballston and the Arlington Cemetery rep being off his head worried that we would take too long somewhere and delay the next funeral, everything went off smoothly. It was a gorgeous day. We managed to bribe the Megatherium with strawberries not to make too many joyous or fussy noises in the church. Grauwulf got up and washed my extremely grubby car first thing in the morning, so it was not too embarrassing as the first car in the long parade of vehicles. My mother and my uncle and I walked behind the caisson from the Old Post Chapel in Ft Meyer to the columbarium (which is a collection of open courts-- more on that in a minute. Our relevant address is complex 7, wall W, row 5, top niche.)

So, full Navy honors for a Commander begins with a 20 minute time block for a religious service (religious specified by Arlington, with option to provide your own officiant or to get an assigned service chaplain) including organist and flag & casket bearers. In this case, there was just an urn, so only one bearer came past the church entryway. Then there was further pageantry with getting the urn into the little drawer on the back of the coffin-sized caisson, and then a procession of possibly about two miles out the cemetery gate of the fort through Arlington Cemetery to the Columbarium. Fifteen or twenty person band, followed by a fifteen person rifle squad, followed by the seven horses and an outrider (four riders) on the caisson, eight bearers marching behind, the three of us walking, my car with grauwulf and my brother in the front seat, (and the Megatherium in the back seat, losing her bonnet & a shoe) and a long parade of other cars. And then there was business-with-presentation-flag (unfolding and refolding) and full military honors (3 rounds of rifle salute, from a different set of rifle bearers), presentation of the flag and several representatives of various things shaking hands and offering condolences, and then my mother got to carry the urn to the niche (though she wasn't allowed to go up the five-step ladder to put it in) and there was a very brief final words from the chaplain. And then the overly time-conscious cemetery representative hurrying everyone back to their cars.

My father retired when I was still in elementary school, so the Navy's rank-based "this was someone special" seems kind of weird to me. I think he did more good for the armed forces, Navy included, than some Admirals but that much of that was more recently in managing DARPA programs for training, for which no official credit is given.

When my grandmother was in the nursing home, my father got very frustrated that she spent a lot of time just sitting there with her eyes shut and didn't seem to care much if anyone had bothered to bring her glasses downstairs or got her teeth in. He told me that when he was that age he hoped he'd be able to enjoy sitting there and watching the squirrels. The corner of the Columbarium he's in now is planted in liriope (ugh) and a nice little magnolia tree, and we will come back sometime and scatter peanuts so that perhaps there will be squirrels to watch.

---- Three of us spoke during the service, first a Navy officer my father worked with in DARPA, then me, then a long-time storytelling friend of the family. This was my ~3 1/2 minutes:

My father was one of the most conscientious people I’ve ever known; he believed in safety guards on saws, and speed limits, and a lot of other things that most people kind of ignore. When I was in high school, he said that if I wanted to dye my hair purple then I was in trouble because he’d let me, but that if I got my ears pierced he’d throw me out of the house. I can’t imagine he would have, but the distinction was between an odd personal choice and something that could have been a safety issue.

He was a self-professed curmugeon, but full of intellectual curiosity and a sense of fun, fond of building things and figuring out how things worked— as a parent he was perhaps a little more excited about elementary school science projects than those of us who were actually supposed to be doing them, and sometimes frustrated when we tried to take the “easy” ways out that he knew from experience weren’t so easy. But when I wanted unobtainable furniture for my post-college apartment, he helped me build a bed to my design specifications. Now I make my own built-in bookshelves, because that’s just what you do, right?

He was very proud of his family: that my brother and I grew up to be the sort of people who enjoy being intellectuals and don’t mind being thought a bit odd, and that my mother continued to find her own interests and worthy causes, even when it meant she turned into the sort of person who couldn’t go for a walk in the woods without stopping to identify plants.

One of the things my father mentioned many times as I was growing up was how intimidated he felt to meet my grandfather: here was someone who had done so many fascinating things with his life, and how could a young engineering student possibly measure up? It took him a while to realize that the problem was that he was trying to measure up to someone who had been an adult for longer than he’d been alive. My husband definitely felt the same way about my father, particularly since they didn’t meet until my father was back in DARPA and sharing all the neat projects he was involved in with anyone who would listen. In fact, it got a little dangerous to call home too often, if you didn’t want to hear the same set of enthusiastic stories again. (and again.)

Now I’m raising my own daughter, and I keep remembering things like the odd little stories my father made up to entertain me, usually with Ann as a character, adventuring in sand castles filled with cats and dogs, or getting eaten by a dragon when I wouldn’t eat my corn. He read me Alice in Wonderland and all the original Oz books, which I recently discovered that he only soldiered though on wisps of nostalgia and the fact that I liked them so much.

He apologized several times in the last few years for being not such a great father in some way, but even as a kid— when fiction tells us we’re supposed to wish we could trade for our friends’ parents because they get more toys or TV watching— I couldn’t imagine wanting anyone else’s family instead of my own. I had two parents I could rely on to support me and each other. My father joked about being embarrassing to his teenage children, but I always felt that it was the rest of the world that was worth rebelling against.

I spent a long time dithering about what to say here: what do you say about one of the people who helped make you *you*, in four minutes or less? My husband says, “you say thank you,” which wasn’t the sort of thing I was thinking of at all, but he’s right.

Thank you, Daddy. You were the best.