It was enough
I bought too much food, which is preferable to running out. The room was full to capacity. It was 111 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and with central air plus an additional room air conditioner it was about 80 degrees in the multipurpose room of the Bedford, Mom’s senior residence. Cousins came. Old family friends came. Mom’s friends from the Bedford came.
I acted as host. I didn’t have anything planned or written down. I just knew I wanted everyone to get a chance to share memories and I wanted Mom, my sister Teresa and my brother Mark to feel like they got what they were hoping to get out of this event. Mark wanted to share Dad’s biographical writings and show the photo montage he made for Mom and Dad’s 60th wedding anniversary, Teresa wanted to make it through without crying too much, Mom wanted a moment to share with her family and friends, and I wanted everyone to hear the only poem Dad wanted read at his funeral (A Logger’s Last Request by Kala Cota). I wanted to hear someone sing The Logger Song (actual name: The Frozen Logger by James Stevens). It was NOT Dad’s favorite song, but it was the song we needled him to sing to us every time we got bored on a long car trip, and so it is the song we most identify with Dad. (I ended up passing the song lyrics around and leading a sing-along. I don’t know what got into me.)
I wanted to feel like Dad was remembered in full. I didn’t want any aspect of him to be left out - his face, his music tastes, his lists, his precise way with numbers, his forestry vocation, his aviation avocation, his tallness, his thinness, his “Trees Are America’s Renewal Resource” bumper stickers, his love and care of Velma and his family, and that smile that I felt he saved for me - the one where he crinkled his eyes and grinned like a happy face icon.
Howard K. Hopkins giving me that grin in 1982
The last time I saw that grin was over a year ago, as he lay in the hospital while the blood that had leaked into his brain was turning to poison and robbing him of everything. He died on a Friday in March 2020. On the following Monday, Oregon then Washington announced “stay at home” orders and closed schools, gatherings, and nonessential travel and businesses due to the coronavirus pandemic. Willamette National Cemetery where Dad was supposed to be interred closed all ceremonies and burials. We brought Dad’s ashes home with a case number to give the cemetery to restart his burial process after the pandemic recedes. Now one year and three months later we are here: possibly days away from a 70% vaccination rate and a full lifting of all coronavirus related restrictions. Dad’s ashes are still with Mom. She is not ready to let them go. She can keep them. But none of us were content to let his passing during a pandemic rob us of a ritual that dates back to the oldest DNA in our bones. We must gather and remember. So we did. Did I do okay? I suppose. Did I do as well as I wished? No.
I tried to write something to say before the funeral, but I didn’t feel like I could write anything of any use that I hadn’t already written in his obituary. I feel like I put it all there and had nothing left to say. However, now that his memorial is over, I feel all those bits of him bobbing to the surface and I have nowhere to lay them down. So here are a few things I want you to know:
He loved camping and his trailers were immaculate and perfectly winterized and prepped every year.
He hated his Parkinson’s Disease. He coped by doing his exercises every morning and pretending it wasn’t affecting him. I wish I could have spoken to him about how frightening it must have been not to be able to trust your own eyes to tell you how to navigate the world, and how it must have felt to become increasingly weak when your whole self worth was based on your strength, but he would admit to none of it.
He wore tan chinos with something like a 36” inseam all his career as a forester and forest manager. He always looked like a cross between a forest ranger, a logger and a stork.
He liked the music of the Sons of the Pioneers. Old school country. No, older school. He also liked to watch Hee Haw back in the 70s, even though we pitched a fit about it. He loved a good corny joke.
He was a quick wit himself and could have claimed the title of Father of All Dad Jokes.
Even though he was born in 1930, he was pretty adept at using a computer. He kept all kinds of spreadsheets and lists, kept in touch with distant relations, and kept up with forestry innovations and flying clubs.
He once flew a single-engine plane from Longview, Washington down to Fairfield, California to pick up my 3-year-old son Dean and take him back to Longview for a vacation.
He could read a tree like a book - family, genus, species, health, age, heck - their inner thoughts as far as I could tell.
He kept a metal bucket of water beside the barbecue grill and after grilling, he would dunk all the briquets in the water to extinguish them to save them for the next grilling session.
When I was maybe 8 or 9, I was already having deep existential, theological questions about the clear contradiction between what I learned in church about the origins of the world and what I learned in science class. Dad explained to me how the stories in the Bible were stories told to explain concepts in ways that people of that age with the technology available to them could understand. He didn’t expect me to take them as fact, but more like fables. That may not have been how the church wanted a parent to explain it, but it allowed me to sleep at night, and still allows me to understand and accept the probable origins of both the universe and the Bible.
I’m glad I told you all that. I think if I would have been able to say some of it, it might have left me with fewer regrets, but I don’t think its absence affected the event in a negative way. No one needed to hear it, I just needed to say it. So here it is. Thanks for listening.