Funeral held Sat. January 12th, 2013

I'd made the trip to attend my father's funeral, but it wasn't until I was sitting in his chair talking to my stepmother and not hearing him participate in the discussion that I realized he was really dead. I'd dialed up CNN because that's what we always used as background to inspire conversation. Here was the President in a live press conference and he wasn't even watching. My father's silence spread a sad feeling through my mind. My brother came in and showed me the obituary from the previous day's paper.

Gotta see if I can get a better picture of that. I was too distracted to check the picture before I went back to talking about funeral plans and the logistics of my brother's taking a new job in Maryland. One issue was that dad had left a huge amount of documentation about how screwed up some of the things the U. S. Govt. had done in other countries. We're talking about a storage locker filled with boxes of paper floor to ceiling. What to do with it? If you have any ideas, dear reader, please let us know. They are free (plus shipping, currently they are in southwestern Virginia) to a good home if you get there soon. Otherwise my brother expects to pitch them in a dumpster. The rent for the storage space is adding up!

After the discussion was over I wandered around looking at the pictures Evelyn had out on the tables and so forth. Most of them had her and my father with a shifting cast of others and/or backgrounds. The one above featured Evelyn's children, their in-laws, and the grandchildren, both of her husbands, and her other husband's other family. It was recent enough that you could see how thin my dad was getting. It was nice to see that he was part of a warm group that last part of his life.

This was the oldest picture of my dad that I found at Evelyn's. He's with his mother, brothers, and father. It was taken just after WW II. I remember it well because for most of the time I knew her my grandmother had it hanging in her bedroom. One time back in the '80s my grandmother told me "I was very glad to get all three boys back after the war, but David was very thin because of the time he had spent in a German POW camp." She even showed me a stack of letters he'd written from there, with stuff the Germans or Americans didn't want shared blacked out. For whatever reason, my dad outlived all the other people in that picture. Now he's gone too.

The next morning we were among the first to get to Bliley's Staples Mill Chapel. The room was all set up. I was surprised how many big batches of flowers there were. My brother's current and previous employers had sent flowers, as had many of Evelyn's friends.

Pieces of History is my dad's autobiography. It's the book to read if you want to find out what it feels like to represent the U. S. Government as a trade negotiator and U. S. Embassy staffer. He knew first hand. Of all the members of his generation, he had the longest Foreign Service career. To find out more click here.

For a while I took pictures of people as they showed up, especially the ones I at least recognized. Some of Evelyn's family I'd only met once or twice, mostly just at the weddings we'd shared. That was at least six years before...

Sometime between taking these pictures I went to the bathroom. On the way out I met a guy who said he worked with my dad in the declassification unit. He said "we solved all the world's problems talking about things while we worked." I'm mad at myself for not taking the guy's picture. I think he was about the only old friend of my fathers who had managed to come to the service. I guess one of the consequences of a long life is outliving the people who could have celebrated your work life.

During our dinner together the previous evening I'd wanted a chance to say a few words. I'd advocated for an "open mike" section for the proceedings. I thought it would be nice to hear different people say things that they remembered about him. Evelyn vetoed that, but told me I was going to be a speaker at the service. I thought about what I was going to say while listening to Evelyn's sister's husband talk about how much fun it had been to do things with John during the time (most of a decade) the two pairs knew each other.

I started by saying that there was much more about my dad than I could say quickly, but he had been amazingly skillful about boiling down complex matters into easy-to-digest pieces. On the table was a copy of his autobiography, but if anybody wanted the supporting documentation we had a storage locker of the stuff that we'd be glad to give to a good home. The most interesting part of his career was the part after he retired, when he did policy development work as a conference organizer for AFSA. The most exciting part of that for me were the conferences he did on oil and foreign affairs. I liked those partly because I talked him into doing all three of them. One of the tricks he had was boiling down the many presentations into simple clear points in attractive brochures that he got scattered around the waiting rooms outside CEO offices and places like that. The year I spent handing out Climate Change briefing books was a remarkable highlight in my life too. It was amazingly beautiful the effect they had on the public mindset in DC. The guy was an awesome public treasure.

Then I sat down. Thinking back on it I'm wondering if I should have talked about meeting Senator J. William Fulbright on the front steps of our home when he visited us in Geneva. Or the time in the '80s when dad told me about the time talking to some hawk in his language class (maybe 1966) he got upset about the guy's neanderthal mindset and decided to do something about it. He'd gone down to Fulbright's office and suggested he hold hearings on the Vietnam story. Fulbright had done so. Talking to Kent Smith during the early days of the GPCA he said "Those were famous hearings, and they had a big role in unraveling support for the war." Another thing I could have mentioned was the time in the '70s when my mom was done with having me around the house. Somehow he'd gotten me into Bradley University, and that had helped me clean up my act a lot. No way would you be reading these words without that help.

There was a reception after, but it was mostly talking and I didn't think flashing my camera would help. Besides, I was hungry and lots of people wanted to shake my hand and say "nice talk". I just relaxed and enjoyed the chatting like everybody else. Then after a while we went down to the graveyard to have a brief ceremony graveside.

The BLAND marker is easy to see from anywhere reasonably close. Evelyn said Waddi plans to end up there too, along with anybody else in the family who wants to be there. It was nice of them to give my dad a spot. The list of famous people in the cemetery includes Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States. Not far to the right of the BLAND tombstone is a similar one with LAND on it.