Eulogy for Francis Grover Darsey, Jr.

Delivering a eulogy for your father is a task you have to do only once in life … maybe never … but certainly not more than once. There is some pressure to “get it right.” Eight or nine minutes is not a lot of time in which to pass benediction on a life of 78 years.

But in a very real sense, I can get it right only for myself and maybe not even that. I can only reflect on the Francis Grover Darsey, Jr. I knew as his eldest son. My father’s life might be thought of as the sum of all of his various relationships, those he had with each of us here today and with those not able to be here, some of whom were at a similar service in Ellijay, GA two weeks ago on what would have been my great uncle Leon's 135th birthday. When I have finished, some of you may choose to share some of your memories and thoughts as well: of Frank as a brother, of Frank as a classmate, of Frank as a shrimper, of Frank as an auto mechanic, of Frank as a photographer, of Frank as a teammate, of Frank as an uncle, of Frank as a friend.

As friends and as family, we are here today to welcome my father home. The Sarasota-Bradenton area is where Dad, his brother Leonard, who is here today, and their older sister Sarah, who was at the service in Ellijay two weeks ago, spent their formative years; it is, I am convinced, where many of Dad's fondest memories were located; it is where he met, more than sixty years ago, my mother, Sharon, and saw the birth of his first child; it is where his first two children spent their earliest years; it is where he met Helen Browning, the woman with whom he spent almost forty years of a life together and with whom he will be reunited today. One of Helen's daughters, Shannon, always Dad's special favorite among the Buckleys, is here today, and on behalf of myself and the Darseys, I want to say thank you to Shannon for being here and for providing a needed symmetry as we place my father's remains here in this historic park where there are several generations of Brownings .

As I was thinking about what to say today, I thought of Arthur Miller’s great American play “Death of a Salesman” and its central character, Willy Loman. Willy’s wife, Linda, says of him that he was not a great man. “He never made a lot of money. His name was never in the papers.” Yet, she concludes, "Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person." And we are here today to do just that, to attend to my father, each of us left to assess the meaning of a relationship that now exists only in memory.

My father and Willy Loman have much in common, beginning with the fact that they were both salesmen, not in the simple sense that they both made their living selling things, but in an almost anachronistic sense that selling was in their blood. Dad was a salesman who believed, as Willy did, that selling was based on personal connections. He prided himself on his ability to ask about the wife—yes, these were simpler, less complicated times—and to keep up with the kids. He loved the pressing of flesh, the backslapping, and the small talk; he had a southerner's gift of gab. He admired John Skelton, whom he met when both were with Hunt-Wesson Foods, John Skelton who used to say “Shake hands with an honest man; ain’t many of us left.”

In sales, as in the rest of his life, Dad was fiercely competitive. He took great pride in getting a Canada Dry machine into an establishment that had, for years, been exclusively Coke; he spent weekends digging postholes for signs advertising product and rearranging grocery store shelves for better product placement. Dad believed in going above and beyond. He set high standards for himself and for those around him. He had little patience with sloth or shoddy work. “A job worth doing is worth doing right,” he often averred, usually meaning that something I or my siblings had done would have to be redone: a pair of shoes re-shined, a section of lawn re-raked, some trim repainted. He frequently said it was easy to be exceptional in a world where so many are content to be mediocre.

Not only in sales, but in canoeing, in weightlifting and body building, in football, in racing, in chess, in board games, Dad’s goal was to win. At the memorial service two weeks ago in Ellijay, we were able to display some of the medals Dad had won in Senior Olympic competitions, some photos of Dad receiving sales awards, some of a young Frank displaying his body-builder physique, and some photos of Dad with trophy fish, all mementos of various victories. These mementos he held close even at the end of his life as his number of possessions dwindled, a signal of how important those memories of his days as a winner were to him. Dad often quoted the legendary Green Bay Packers football coach Vince Lombardi, saying “Show me eleven good losers, and I’ll show you a losing football team,” and “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” This relentless striving undoubtedly served him well, starting out his marriage to my mother with very little by way of resources and nothing beyond a high school education. On the basis of his ambition and his native abilities, he rose to the executive ranks in the soft drink industry. It is a character trait that he urged on his children, a mixed blessing: on the one hand an eternal prod, an ever present dissatisfaction with what might have been better; on the other hand, a willingness to do what we needed to do to distinguish ourselves, to make the grade.

I don’t know where this competitive streak came from. What I do know is that my father was pursued by daemons all his life, daemons that no one I know claims to fully understand. He was a man of great gifts, physically and intellectually; he had the advantages of an upbringing in a stable home amid comfortable material circumstances; but I have come to believe my father was always driven by the terrifying fear that he was never good enough; he always felt the breath of his own four horsemen hot on the back of his neck; he was forever having to prove himself to himself.

Parkinson’s was particularly cruel for Dad. It ravaged him in the two areas most important to him, the two areas most central to his sense of self—his physical strength and his intellectual power. It left him unable to be Frank, unable to exercise the full range of his charm; unable to be himself in the world any longer. And it left him with enough awareness to mourn what was being steadily, mercilessly eroded.
Some find comfort in notions of divine order and universal justice. I prefer to consider a chaotic universe that has only what meaning we are able to impose on it, otherwise I would have to consider what justice was being served by my father’s wasting.

For a time, Dad thought he could prevail even over Parkinson’s. It was only in the past six months or so that Dale and I were pressed to remove the last of his weights and his weight bench from his room. I worried that Dad would try to make this a fight to the finish, that he would challenge death to an arm-wrestling match, winner take all. In the end, though, Dad revealed a kind of hard-won wisdom; he recognized that the quality of life was more important than the mere act of living.

In our family, we’ve long held to a rumor that none of us has ever bothered to confirm, a rumor that the Inuit custom, when a relative has gotten too old to contribute any longer to the household, too old even to chew hide to soften it, is to put that relative out on an ice floe to serve as polar bear bait, a final contribution to the commonweal. This unconfirmed rumor is the source of a long-running joke in our tribe of Darseys. To anyone who finds such humor brutal, I would say only we didn’t play touch football in our family—literally or metaphorically. My sister Lisa was the only one of us ever to make a trip to the emergency room as a result of one of our backyard scrimmages, but all of us suffered our bruises and contusions. We tackled with our jokes as surely as we tackled on the field. It was expected that we would give as good as we got, and vice versa; Dad not excepted. My father was especially fond of two t-shirts given to him by his children. One of them said “Old age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill.” The other, given to him after he and Helen had moved into assisted living: “Some days, it’s just not worth it to chew through the restraints.” Given our habit of wrapping hard truths in a laugh, it should not be surprising that, on one of the last visits my brother Dale and I together had with Dad, he said he’d been “thinking a lot about ice floes lately.” We got the joke, but we also understood that he was making a serious statement about his current quality of life and whether or not it was worth was worth continuing to live that life.

I've lived across the street from a funeral home for twelve years now. The patterns I've observed convince me that, in some mysterious but significant way, we choose when to let go. The night the nurse called me from the nursing home to tell me that Dad was fading fast and that she didn't expect him to make it through the night … that night was the 38th anniversary of Frank's marriage to Helen. One need not subscribe to paranormal or mystical epistemologies to believe, as I do, that the timing here was more than mere coincidence.

Dad was not a devout or a particularly spiritual man. Church was tolerable only so long as he had the opportunity to sing the old familiar hymns of his childhood. He never forgave the Methodists the new hymnal that came out in the mid-1960s. I don't know what he thought about or hoped for in the afterlife. I can tell you what I hope for him. I hope that he finds peace. I hope that he is, at last, free of his daemons, that his will not be a restless spirit. Peace to you, Dad, and peace be with you.