Eulogy

Me being here right now goes to show that you think your friends and loved ones will be there with you forever, and then in a second, things change and they’re gone. You have to appreciate those special people around you every day, not only in death — and I did appreciate my granddad every day of my life. We both did everything we could to help out one another. When unfortunate circumstances left me without a place to stay a few years back, my granddaddy took me in and let me live with him for nearly two years until I was able to get back on my feet. When unfortunate circumstances left him alone and without a car, I made sure to swing by several times per week to feed him, bathe him, buy him groceries, take him to get his haircut, take him to the bank, and to do whatever else he needed, despite living an hour away. Throughout my life, grandpa has been my moral compass and the strongest man I think I ever met. He overcame bypass surgery at 88, a gall bladder removal at 92, a bajillion falls without ever breaking a single bone, and hardest of all, he overcame the death of my grandma in 2003. Through it all, he never lost his smile and he never lost his way — he never let life bring him down. He just kept moving on. Anybody that knows my granddaddy will tell you the same thing: His sole purpose in life was to please my grandmother. Everything he did, he did for her. It was a love the likes of which I’ve only ever seen with them, and it’s that same love that my wife and I try to emulate in our own life. A wise person told me a long time ago that as long as you’ve got memories of a person, then they aren’t really dead because they’re still existing in your thoughts — and boy, do I have memories of my grandpa! From the days when I was a kid and he would take me to the park to play, to the days when I was a grown-up and I would take him to the ballpark to root on our hometown, to the many weekends we went to the dog races with grandma, to the cruise we went on, the trips to Disney World and wherever else, the many birthdays we celebrated together, the day we celebrated our pro basketball team winning their first championship, the day we mourned my grandma’s passing, every Thanksgiving at my sister’s and every Christmas at my aunt’s house, all the falls and their subsequent recoveries, the graduations, my wedding where I was able to get granddaddy on the dance floor with his walker, to harder more recent days like when the wifey and I held his hand as he prayed for both his mom and my grandmother to help him through this last very hard phase of his life or when I held his hand as they read him the last rites in his deathbed, or when he took his very last breath ever in front of me, he and I have really run the gamut of emotions together. Now, there are two ways I can choose to look at that: I can either be selfish and say I still want him here, despite the fact that he’d be in pain for the rest of his life, or I can choose to let him fly back to grandma and go on celebrating the many years I was blessed to have him by my side. I’ll choose the latter because that’s what he would have wanted. Thank you, grandpa, for bringing peace and love into my life, always and forever! Thank you for always being there for me and letting me be there for you! You were a great family man, a great husband, a great granddad, and an amazing example of the type of person I’ve always aimed to be in this life! May your soul rest in peace, and your memories forever live on!!