Elizabeth Florio

It’s amazing, my somersaulting state of mind. I wake up in the morning and worry over my outfit. I mill through grocery aisles, looking for this or that. I laugh with Ryan.

And all of sudden, when I’m lying in bed or driving alone, you come back to me. I picture your face the way it looked after you died—the peaceful expression, your soft brown hair streaked with gray. I picture your face the way I saw it a million times when you were alive—thrown back in a laugh.

And I think, How can I get through this? How does anyone get through this?

Before I know it, I’m plodding through my day again, and when you come back to me I wonder, How can I have let you go even for a minute?

Yours is my first experience with death. I have known people who have died, even a good old friend, but never anyone who was a fixture in my life, much less the guiding force of my life. I have lived my twenty-six years as if a bit of fishing line stretched between the crown of my head and your finger, you gently pulling me along.

You are the center of our family. Since you’ve been gone, I can’t say we even feel like a family. Is that what it means to lose a loved one? To never be whole again? To go through life permanently broken?

I witnessed the final months, hours, and seconds of your life. I witnessed the arduous yet orderly process in which a body shuts down. You fought so hard not to leave us, and yet in this, as in everything, you guide us. Perhaps it was a small comfort to you these last two years, knowing you could lead your family across the great divide. We’ll all get there someday.

I am reluctant to call you a perfect man, Dad, even though in most ways you were. You were a man of integrity and passion. Of kindness and wisdom and joy. None of these words is too large for you. Even as we ache for you, you loom large before us and we aspire to emulate a life well lived:

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
 to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
 to appreciate beauty; 
to find the best in others;
 to leave the world a bit better, whether by healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
 to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
 This is to have succeeded. —Bessie Stanley

I read this at my father’s memorial service on June 8, 2010, at St. Philips Cathedral in Atlanta, Georgia:

At our house we have a rule that it doesn’t count as bragging as long as you’re bragging to a family member. For example, if my dad won an ALTA tennis match, he was allowed to come home, crack open a beer, and recount every single point of the match to his children and wife.

My dad had a unique ability to remember every point in a tennis match, every pitch in an at-bat. I have vivid memories of riding home with him from soccer games, and we’d rehash every little thing I did well or could have done better. Those were long rides, and often I was glad to get home, but standing here today, I can tell you I wish I was back in that passenger seat and that the ride would never end.

Today, I can talk about how great a man my father was, and it doesn’t count as bragging. We’re all family today.

The best way I can express the kind of father he was is to place him in a few familiar, cherished scenarios. The first is those car rides home from soccer games. For my brothers, it was baseball games, and for my sister, swim meets. My dad’s favorite piece of advice to Ruth before a swim meet was, “Swim like a racehorse.”

The second scenario is him sitting at the head of our family dinner table, laughing so hard the veins popped out of his face and he turned bright red. We have a big family, and my parents love to cook, and they appreciate a good bottle of wine, and our family dinners always seemed like a celebration.

When the kids were little, we played silly games at the dinner table. One of them was a rhyming game—some of you in this room probably played it with us. When we got older, the dinner conversations inevitably took a turn south, to the chagrin of my grandmother Pat, who had the familiar refrain: “I didn’t raise him to talk like that.” One of the many ways my dad will live on is in the discussion of inappropriate subjects at the dinner table, especially by my sister, Ruth. She’s really good at it.

The third scenario is my dad in the driver’s seat of our van as we made the trip to my parents’ hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin. My parents always tried to make the drives themselves interesting, so we’d stay in Holidomes and see the state parks and historical sites along the way. We kids liked to complain about seeing Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home year after year, but I know we loved it. We actually had themed road trips: One summer we followed the course of the Lincoln-Douglas debates; another Thanksgiving, the Underground Railroad. On that particular trip, there was going to be a meteor shower early one morning. We checked out of our hotel in Maysville, Kentucky at the crack of dawn, laid on our backs in the parking lot in the freezing cold, and watched the stars shoot across the sky.

My dad taught me a valuable lesson for when I have kids of my own: to be curious, and to take the back roads.

I could go on forever about the way he made our childhood special. He loved Christmas; every Christmas tradition had to be observed just so. He loved folk music, and discussing the meanings of song lyrics. He talked to us about everything, knew how each of his kids worked and what buttons to push. He was our best friend.

But the most important gift my dad gave to his children was his love for my mother. He loved her so much. He also loved to make fun of her. But the things he made fun of her for—singing mindlessly around the house, her attempts to recycle everything—he also loved about her.

My dad died a day before their thirty-third wedding anniversary. They were married when they were twenty-two, high school sweethearts at eighteen. My dad tells the story of walking down the hallway of Craig High, and beautiful Sue Cerny wouldn’t give him a second look, and he didn’t know it was because she hadn’t worn her glasses that day. They spent more than two-thirds of their lives together, and I know they wanted it to be more.

It’s been difficult to start my own marriage as my parents have faced this crossroads in theirs. More than once I laid awake in the middle of the night and thought about what it would be like to lose my husband. I tried to multiply that feeling times infinity.

My dad’s death has taught me that there aren’t any answers to this problem—that to love someone is to accept the pain of losing them, and that to accept it doesn’t make it any less painful. But I don’t think anyone in my family, or in this room, would trade the joy and riches of love for a reprieve from this pain.

On the night he died, one of the last things I said to my dad was, “We really won the lottery, didn’t we?” He wasn’t saying much at that point, but he managed to communicate that he agreed.

I know my dad is in a better place. My faith tells me he is looking down on me right now. Though I cannot have him here on earth anymore, there is a comfort in knowing that the day I die, he will be waiting for me.

Thank you.