I wrote this two months ago, as my dad died on January 29. but attending yesterday’s climate march pushed me to post it publicly (dad was a co-laureate on the IPCC Nobel for his work on climate adaptation). This one’s for you, Dad.
Dad told me, a long time ago, that he didn’t want a funeral. That if he had anything, he wanted to have a party - that a good party was much cheaper than even a cheap casket. And that it better have good music, good food, and good drink, and it shouldn’t have any speeches.
Now, we’re violating that last request. Because he also told me, the same day, that these kinds of events are for the living. That what we hope to achieve at an event like this is to help us, not to help the deceased. To help us process the loss, to help us integrate the incredibly sudden, and completely final, absence of someone we loved into our new lives.
That was the day of his mom’s – my grandmother’s – funeral. I was in my mid twenties. I’d missed my maternal grandmother’s funeral, living in France at the time, and I never met any of my male grandparents, so that was the first time I had to confront a close death. He was trying to help me, even as he suffered. And those words have stuck with me to this day, and I’m going to try to honor him in this eulogy, but I’m also trying to pass along that gift of assistance. To help all of us through that process.
This was very hard to write. In the end, we realized that for a lot of people, Dad was a certain type of person. A work colleague, a husband, a parent, a friend. But not that many people knew all the sides of Dad. For a lot of reasons, he often kept those pieces separate from one another. But the thing about Dad is that the more you knew of him, the better it got. So I’m going to tell some stories about Dad, so that we can all walk out of here tonight with a more complete picture of him. So that we can integrate the fullness of him into our memories, and keep him there as we process his absence here on earth.
Uncle Dana just gave you a sense of what Dad was like as a big brother. And I have some sense of that time in his life as well. I loved to pester him with questions about where he came from, what shaped him. And he was usually elliptical – he’d answer personal questions with philosophy, most of the time. But I got enough out of him over the years, especially after I became a father as well, to tell you a few things.
First, he loved greenery. I mean, he loved it. He loved the mountains, and the woods. Hated the damn beach, but would do anything to spend summer weeks in Colorado in the high alpine forests, and he loved the green drive to the lab from west Knoxville. It bugged him that Middelbrook Pike got built up, because it took away from the absolutely all-surrounding green. I got him a little lit up on wine one night in Boston, early in my relationship with Carolina, and pushed him on it a little.
He told me that he lived for a long time in dry, dusty places, in a dry and dusty time after the Depression. He talked about being a night worker at the Ace Motel, a disreputable place on the south side of Oklahoma City, and the dust blowing constantly in the wind, he talked about Canyon Texas, he talked about building a cabin high on a mountaintop in Taos (the one thing he loved out of the dry, it seemed), and more. And then he said when he came to Tennessee for the first time, it was almost overwhelming how green it was. That it reminded him of Mason OH, which was the closest thing he had in his mind to “home” as a child, even though he never lived there. That it reminded him of spending a summer in a work camp in Switzerland, which had been an escape from other summers working as an elevator repairman, or at a Sears warehouse. That the simple pleasure of green was actually a piece of his decision to join the Lab back in the late 70s.
He wasn’t as purely rational as he liked to seem, you see. He was just good at hiding his emotions.
Another thing is that Dad was tough as hell. Physically and mentally. I’m guessing that a lot of his work colleagues saw the mental toughness, in his ability to produce work at a rate that seems almost impossible for one person. But it wasn’t just mental.
Dad went through college on an ROTC scholarship, which meant he had to muster into the regular Army on graduation to pay it back with service. He was not a typist, it’s safe to say – he joined the infantry as an officer, he went through Airborne school successfully, and then through Ranger school successfully. Five people died in the Ranger course he took – mostly through drowning while carrying heavy loads and dangerously deprived of sleep.
Dad didn’t like to talk about that experience much. I did get a great story out of him once though: each Ranger candidate was going to be assigned leadership of a commando unit once over the course of seven days, and if you made any mistakes when you were leading the unit, you washed out. Thanks to other candidates making mistakes, Dad got taken prisoner at one point, hogtied and his mouth filled with mud – this was in a swamp, and the regular army guys holding the high ground would get a week’s leave if they kept the Ranger candidates away. When he got his shot, he hadn’t slept in four days. But he was able to keep it together and they took the high ground.
What he talked about was how you could force your mind to override your body, to a certain extent. How that ability was something that distinguished success from failure all across life – to show up when others didn’t, to perform when others were tired, to perform under pressure when others cracked. How that ability came from practice, from willpower, and to a certain extent, from good luck – the luck to be physically and mentally stable. How if you had that luck, it was your job to use it.
We saw that throughout life with Dad, for things as simple as driving through the night to get to the beach. But it was very evident after he got sick. He fought through three surgeries, atrial fibrillation, multiple bouts with pneumonia, a stomach tube that constantly fell out and leaked gastric juices onto his skin, hospital-induced dementia, and indignities that I won’t go into in public. He lost his ability to speak, to eat, to drink – all things he loved desperately. And yet he fought on. He spent the last year of his life writing a new book, called Living With Climate Change, which will be published soon – the beginning of the prologue is in your programs. He finished it just a few weeks before his death.
A lot of people pretend to be tough. Dad taught us that really tough people don’t need to advertise. That you can figure out who they are just by watching and seeing – do they show up? Do they crack? Are they reliable?
Dad always showed up, and Dad didn’t crack. He was tough as nails. The old paratrooper fought and worked til the very damn end.
A third thing about Dad was that he could contain in his head an incredible number of ways to see. He could look at a problem and not be boxed in by one way of seeing it – he was the opposite of a lot of what we have in politics today, in that way, on either side.
When he wanted to learn about something, he would read everything he could get his hands on. He’d read the stuff that everyone read, but he’d also go to extremes to find other points of view, including ones he disagreed with. When I was young I learned my way around a library by helping him chase down books, papers, chapters, cartoons, you name it – and I learned at the same time that being able to hold several positions in my head at once meant I could see way more dimensions than people who got trained to hold one position.
This is the skill that let him see the long game, which let him marry complex theoretical work to real world implications. That’s what let him look at the Green Revolution in India – a revolution about food crops – and see a future world full of crises for energy and land and sustainability. That’s what let him look at climate change and immediately jump to thinking about what it meant for humans to adapt to that change. That’s what led him to think about how geography impacts terrorism, and a full decade of deep work with the Defense Department.
Because he didn’t want to just think about a single position and write a paper about it. He wanted to use his understanding to improve people’s lives. To anticipate problems and have solutions sitting, ready, when they were needed.
He would have cackled at the news in the past two weeks of the infrastructure failures at the Oroville Dam in California. That’s precisely the kind of thing he anticipated, the way that climate change meant normal things like droughts would get more extreme, and that the end of the drought would mean even more extreme rains, and that infrastructure built for non-extreme events would therefore fail in predictable ways that could be planned for. And he loved being right – it meant that he had stared through the problem and seen its bones.
Dad was also a deeply artistic guy. He channeled a lot of that into work – you can see it in his writing, especially his writing for broad audiences. But there was a deeper artistic sense in there, one that not everyone maybe knew about. He consumed more music and more books than anyone I’ve ever met – across a dizzying array of genres and styles. He read high literature and low literature, fancy books and dimestore mysteries. He loved latin jazz, bluegrass, new Orleans music, rock and roll, classical music, anything you could imagine.
I think if he’d been a little more willing to risk himself he’d have been a lot more of an artist. He had perfect pitch (if he hadn’t gotten stuck playing trombone he might have stuck with performing). And he was an incredible writer. He wrote a small history of his family tree for Lisa and me nearly twenty years ago and it’s full of just incredible sentences, like this one about a small town called Pikeville KY, where they lived when he was young:
“I remember Saturday movies, (with suspenseful serials, sort of young-male-oriented-soap-operas), sledding in wintertime, coal fires in the fireplace in the winter, Christmas time in the local Presbyterian church (the minister’s daughter was my fourth-grade girlfriend!), Kentucky basketball on the radio, and the taste of honeysuckle.”
That’s the way a writer remembers a place. I wish he’d written more about non work things. He told me once that he wanted to write novels but was afraid of being as honest as he’d need to be for them to be good.
He loved fine dining – for the past 25 years, he reveled in taking me and Lisa out to dinner in DC and elsewhere, always showing up with detailed ideas and research on restaurants, dishes, even routes for the taxicabs. He loved to eat. Losing that ability was one of the great insults of the past three years. And boy did he love wine. He’d be glad we have it tonight. Some of my best memories with dad involve food and wine, and I’m deeply sad that Noah won’t get to know him that way as he grows up. It’s weird to think I’ll play that role for him, because Dad played it so well.
He was incredible with kids. He was a very physical grand-dad – down on the floor, rolling around, playing the fool, doing anything for a laugh. One of his favorite yearly traditions was to spend November collecting details about what everyone was into that year, and assembling incredibly personal stockings for each of us on the couch, full of personal touches. He spent a hundred hours a year on it, easily.
Now, he wasn’t perfect. He was human, and no human is perfect. I won’t dwell on his flaws, but I will say that God help you if you got in the way of his trips to WalMart. He’d start snorting – he always did that when he was good and mad – sounding like a congested dragon. And his very toughness and emotions could sometimes blind him a little bit to the struggles that characterize our own lived experiences – he told me that himself once.
But that toughness was on the balance something that was a good trait for Dad. It carried him through the fight with cancer. He was always grateful to his care team – Dr Carlson, Dr Stephenson, Dr Locasio, Dr Mancini, just to name a few – and the entire universe of everyone who supported him as he tried to find his way back from the abyss of summer 2014. Even in the hospital, stripped of his ability to speak or eat or drink, he would grab the white board to ask a nurse how he or she was doing in writing.
OK, I’m pretty sure that if he’s somewhere watching, he’s making the dragon breathing. He didn’t want long speeches, or a funeral. He wanted a party with live music and I’m now officially in the way. So I’ll wrap up.
I don’t know how Dad would have felt about this. I hope he would have liked it. But, as I said at the start, he also told me these events are about the living. We retell the story of the one we have lost, and fit our own stories into that story, as part of how we process and integrate their loss into our ongoing lives. And in that memory, we can keep a piece of them alive, in us, by connecting our stories to their stories. By telling those stories over time, looking at those photographs, watching those videos, eating those foods, reliving the memories.
So thanks to all of you for coming. Don’t stop telling stories about Dad. Don’t stop looking at photos, or watching videos, or eating those foods. Because as long as you keep him alive in your mind and your heart, he’s not gone. And that’s the best possible way for us to honor him – to say his name, and to live like he lived.
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