Twelve years. A day, and forever. Not sure which. But it does, finally, feel like enough distance that I can bear to go back and find the eulogy I wrote for his funeral. It was the best I could do to build a memorial for him at the time. Turns out, it still brings him vividly back to me today, so I will build it again here, that he may be remembered by all of us who knew him and known at least a little by those of you who didn’t have the chance. May we all experience a love like my father’s, in whatever shape it may present itself. ????
I’m Mandy. I’m the younger daughter of Dan and Deb – who we used to call Daddy and Mommy – but then we started calling them Nurn and Mudd for reasons mostly lost in the mists of time. Fundamentally, though, those reasons were, number one, silliness, and number two, love. Wherever Nurn was, there was always a lot of silliness and a lot of love.
We learned in January that this end was coming soon. And Nurn and Mudd and my older sister Jodie and her husband Hal and their son Xander and me and my husband John – we all became pretty much inseparable. We got a final few weeks of silliness and love.
We spent the time saying how much we loved each other – in words and in the way we treated each other. Nurn tried to take care of Mudd in advance by explaining how everything in the house worked, so she’d be OK without him. A lot of the time, we just spent reminiscing. “Good times” became our catchphrase. And thanks to Nurn’s extraordinary serenity and strength and love – his amazing attitude – those last few weeks were also “good times.”
But in that time, there was one memory I never got around to sharing with Nurn. I kept meaning to but I never actually did, and I wish I had. So I’ll share it with you now, at least.
When I was tiny, I remember I was afraid to walk over a grating or a wooden dock or anything with a gap where you could see the drop below you. I knew things could slip through, between the cracks, and fall down and down – I could SEE the HOLE! And I was terrified that I would fall through.
Well, one day we were all walking through a garden, and we came to a little wooden bridge over a brook. There was an extra-big gap between two of the planks! Panic time. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move.
But Nurn was holding my hand. He told me I could step over it and I’d be fine. I remember this clearly. He said, “I’d never tell you to do anything that would hurt you.”
And I remember I thought about that, and I decided that that made sense. So I gathered up my courage and stepped over the crack. And he was right – I didn’t fall through!
I trusted his love completely. Always.
He had so much love and so much truth. Nurn was never going to deceive you or turn on you. You could build your whole world on his love. And know that it wouldn’t fall through the cracks.
Even now.
I know that love has not ended. Because we haven’t ended – Mudd and Jodie and Xander and the little girl on the way and Hal and John and me and all the rest of us here who loved him back. We can go forward knowing that everything we do and everything we are, it all had Nurn’s total, unstinting, admiring, pure-hearted love.
Thank you, Nurn. I love you.