I have thought of how to start this eulogy countless times in the last eleven years, ever since Dad was diagnosed with an incurable disease. I have dreaded this day, as anyone does, when I will both want to stay small and take in such a sea of care, and yet hope to give one of the most poignant speeches of my life. A speech worthy of its subject.

I had imagined that Dad, with his abbreviated years, with his cruel death sentence and slow march, would now teach me one final thing: Dad would teach me how to die. I would walk with him, and I would not be afraid. This would be his final lesson.
My father was the greatest of teachers. From the very beginning he taught me a reverence for life, he called it, by taking me outside in the early morning to crouch down on the ground and look for the worms wiggling up. The man never squished an ant. These were al l “God’s creatures,” Dad taught me.

He tried to show us how to mix business with pleasure. At the bike shop, Mary and I would spend an afternoon with Dad. He took these moments to break out of the ordering and building and fixing to bring fun to us. My favorite was when he took bike boxes and cut them up to construct little villages for us. Dad built us doors that swung, windows cut with four squares to imitate panes, and room upon room for us to crawl through. From then on, I never walked into the shop without thinking of my bike box city and how my Dad made it for me. Amidst a busy work day, he stopped for fun, for us.

Dad showed me how to look at something from a new perspective. When I got my housing assignment for freshman year at UConn, I cried. I could not believe I would be so far from campus, in such run-down buildings. However, these buildings, it turns out, had been the very same that Dad inhabited. So Dad’s attitude burst through in a broad smile and characteristic enthusiasm. He expounded on beach parties in basements where some guys from the third floor had hauled in sand, or how he took a psychology course and couldn’t wait to try the next one, or that time he attended a yoga workshop and made the friendship with Swami that would glow in his heart his whole life. Dad taught me that there is more than meets the eye. You make your life with what you’ve got, and you’ve got a lot. He gave that to me.

Somewhere in the early years of his illness, he called and asked if I’d like to go for a bike ride. We had a smooth, slow rail trail a quarter mile away. We climbed on our bicycles and off we went, chatting along a flat and peaceful path. A little concerned, I had to ask, “Dad, isn’t it a little dangerous for you to be riding a bike, with your bones and all?” He replied, “You know, Elizabeth, I talked to the doctors about it, and they’re not thrilled, but I said to them, I’m going to go one way or another. So I told them that I’m going to enjoy what I’ve got while I’ve got it.” Indeed, he never really lost it; just two weeks before his death, he went with one granddaughter on their own bike ride. My dad showed me how to get it right until the end.

As time continued, and Dad kept on going for treatments upon treatments, being the star guinea pig for many clinical trials, and giving testimony for a new drug, I just couldn’t see how my Dad was teaching me to die. He wasn’t dying! Dad, my Dad, was living. He kept on living, he kept on visiting, fixing, chatting, philosophizing, advising, playing, watching, encouraging, sharing, laughing and riding.

And so my father’s final teaching to me, as I said goodbye to him for eleven years, was not how to die well, but how to live fully, unabashedly, without fear, with grace, grit humor and love.

Elizabeth Johnson Maurer