A Eulogy for My Grandpa

Note: This is a version of the eulogy I wrote for my mom’s dad this past year (he passed away in March at 94 years old). I read this to my relatives during his graveside service. It includes excerpts from journals he wrote during his LDS mission in the early 1950s, which is where he met my grandma, who was also a missionary.

I didn’t read this exact version at his graveside. The eulogy I actually read was edited to remove superfluous details about my personal life and experiences during the time I worked as one of his caretakers between 2015 and 2017. Those I’ll share here, on my personal blog.

For additional context, my grandparents instigated the creation of at least 3 or 4 neighborhoods worth of human bodies and maybe 98ish% of those bodies also went on LDS missions, stayed in the faith, made bundles of babies, or all of the above. I’m one of the 2ish% that didn’t do any of that, and, putting it mildly, that generally isn’t considered a non-issue for ultra-devout families.

In fact, in 2015, the issue was still particularly raw for those closest to me, including my grandpa. It was a tricky time of my life for other reasons as well, but it all culminated into my being particularly sensitive to familial judgment and desperate for unconditional love. I found none of the former and all of the latter with my grandpa, without end, and I love him dearly for it.

Grandpa Paul

My grandpa loved his family. He loved to hear about our successes and grieved for our pains. He loved us. And I can say that confidently, because I don’t think he was one to say anything he didn’t mean, and he would say it all the time, and prove it in the way he treated us.

I got to be one of his caretakers for about a year and a half before I moved to California. It was my sister’s idea. I was living with her at the time, and she saw firsthand how deeply I was struggling with anxiety and depression, and like a true granddaughter of our grandmother, she recognized the opportunity for me to heal through service. The time I spent with my grandparents marked a turning point for me, and I know I’m not alone in experiencing their love like a balm, like medicine.

Grandpa introduced me to anyone who walked through his door as Bekah Bekah. “We call her Rebekah for Repeat Bekah,” he’d say.

When he was shuffling out the door with my uncle on his way to speak at a friend’s funeral, I said, “Knock ‘em dead, Grampa!”

He called back, “They already are!”

After returning home from having an MRI, he told me proudly, “And I didn’t even take the Valium.”

I asked him, “You freaked out though, right?”

“Oh yeah, screamed my head off.”

I love that he called me “a real Jonny on the Spot” whenever I walked in right when I was expected. He told me I was a blessing; I told him he was the best boss I ever had.

I’d quit my full-time job several weeks prior—before my brain could finish pickling in that place. It had become the site of trauma and for years after I couldn’t drive passed it without having a PTSD response. When I left, I pivoted to becoming a full-time student so I could finally finish my degree. My calendar was sprinkled with classes broken up by shivering in my partner’s frightened arms, therapy, missed meals, and reparative shifts at Grandpa’s. Though working part time for my grandparents had the healing effect of service, Grandpa still cut me a check every week so I’d have something trickling in while I went to school.

I wrote about him in a creative nonfiction course:

To paint a brief picture of an average shift at Grandpa’s, I arrive, he tells me something charming like, ‘This new scooter is the bee’s knees’ or ‘My old egg boiler went the way of the world,’ then I make breakfast, do the dishes, laundry, and always before the end, he tells me, ‘Rebekah, you are just such a blessing to your old grandpa.’ Though my grandma is still alive, he grieves for the wife he’s already losing to her ailing memory; he gets lonely, and I’ve never left a shift without hearing how much I’m loved and appreciated. It’s a great way to start the day and pay a few bills.

But at least twice a week he tells me how concerned he is for me, and the same conversation always follows.

“I get concerned for you too, Grandpa,” I say.

“You do?”

“I’m afraid of you falling,” I tell him. He’s fallen before, trying to post a letter. When I got there, I found him in the doorway with a six-inch gash on his forearm, but, luckily, no other injuries—except to his ego, he said.

“Well, I’ve fallen for you, Bekah Bekah,” he says, and adds to avoid confusion, “in the right way.”

I smile and he says, “I understand your boyfriend isn’t the religious type.”

Usually, I remind him my partner treats me well, but this time I say, “I’m not either anymore.”

“I know,” he says, and tries to laugh through the emotion that has always been just under the surface for him, for as long as I’ve known him. “I worry about that too.”

“What do you worry about, Grandpa?” I ask. It was deeper than our chats about my personal life usually go. His unwavering approval of me encouraged me to think that he only saw his granddaughter, and not a fallen woman, a lesser version of a person he used to know. Sitting in his computer den after helping him file some medical statements, and asking him this question, I was suddenly worried he would shatter that illusion.

He hesitates a little and says, “I just want you to stay clean—wholesome.”

I wonder if my smile looks a little sad. “Well, what do you think of me now?”

He laughs a little and his eyes are wet. “I think you’re pretty great.”

I inherited his sensitivity, so I try not to cry too as I pretend that he knows well enough that my adult relationship with my adult boyfriend is fully adult, and that it truly hasn’t changed the way he sees me.

I’ve experienced conditional love, and it’s a pain I’m still trying to describe, but Grandpa and Grandma’s house was always a feel-better place. You could always count on unconditional love—and the candy jar—being there, waiting just for you. Grandpa’s love helped me reclaim my self-worth and recalibrate my happiness meter. He helped me return to the person he’d seen in me all my life.

During each shift at Grandpa’s, for about a half hour I would sit in his office and type up his missionary journals. I’d forgotten just how long it had taken to finish transcribing them until the day Grandpa passed. When I got word he’d died, I dug up my files and realized I’d transcribed almost 150,000 words, or 252 single-spaced pages.

I was careful to preserve everything as faithfully as possible to the exact way it was written, though I put question marks in parentheses here and there when I couldn’t make something out—as well as all caps exclamations in the headers when I got really excited about something (more on that in a second). In reading Grandpa’s journals, you’ll fall in love all over again with this well-raised, intelligent, and charmingly funny man, just like I did.

Transcription isn’t like reading, I found. Typing up Grandpa’s journals was like existing in a time capsule for thirty minutes a day, a youthful version of Grandpa’s voice in my ear, speaking up from the fingerprint of his penmanship and the echoes of his past. His exclamations and expressions are clever and heartwarming, his personality fun-loving and reverent all at once. That never changed, but I still got to know the man exactly as he was when Grandma got to know him, while the Grandpa I’d known all my life worked on crossword puzzles in the other room.

Here are a few highlights:

On July 3, 1951, a Tuesday, he wrote these fated words “…went down and made a deal on the little 1948 Nash 600 for $900 with a 50-50 thirty day guarantee. I sure hope I’m making the best deal.” Record-scratch to exactly thirty days later and car troubles start plaguing him every other entry. By October he’s referring to it as Nasheba and he and his companion are hitchhiking regularly to get where they need to go. In addition to hitchhiking, he also went to a lot of movies—which must not have been against mission rules at the time, because Grandpa was otherwise scrupulously concerned about keeping mission rules, especially when it came to Grandma (more on that later too!).

Then there’s his increasing angst over the endless ironing of white shirts, the clockwork chronicling of the quality of each meal members served him, but this entry from July 8, 1950, really made me laugh: “Hammond’s certainly treated us fine […] They have four girls. The youngest, BB Dale, certainly remind[s] me of Denice. Same size, manner of action and likeness of voice. Didn’t get to see the oldest.” This is followed by a curse of disappointment, which he censors with an X and exclamation point.

The reminders of his youth and boyishness feel precious and sweet. At the start of his mission, he’d correspond with a girl named Lorraine and his companion called her letters the “sugar report.” But she faded to the background after he met Grandma. You’ll see my excitement in the header for the entry made on August 24, 1951, a Friday—GRANDMA’S MENTIONED FOR THE FIRST TIME!

But he mentions her in passing. She’s just joined his district and he notices her crying for part of the bus ride after leaving her previous district. “Being a girl” she couldn’t help the tears, he wrote, a funny thing to say for a man we could all rely on get wonderfully misty about everything close to his heart—a trait I think most of us inherited, including the crumpling chin.  

But just four months after he mentions Grandma for the first time, he’s writing this:

I’ve surely got to watch myself as I seem to be developing quite a fondness for Sister Gerber, not that it is anything not to be desired, but on a mission it’s not so good. She seems to be a little that way towards me, which thing I both like to see and don’t. She likes to sit by me whenever we take them anywhere in the car, and some of the things she says seem to indicate so. Maybe I’m just being conceited or over optimistic. But the big thing is to control it ‘til the proper time and then test its genuineness. Oh it’s nothing serious.

Grandpa’s love for people is ablaze in every entry, and evident in the detail he commits to describing his interactions with everyone he meets. And because of this commitment, we get to experience his falling in love with Grandma:

January 25, 1952:

Can’t keep away from the gal, and she even gives me the encouragement that she likes my company. I hope I’m not being vain. I guess this is it. In fact there’s no doubt. Five months and then—who knows. Surely hope though that I don’t let it bother my missionary work. I know that it has to a degree distracted me. That’s bad. Otherwise—well gosh!

March 2, 1952:

It’s real, Diary, it’s mighty real. I still can’t understand how I restrained myself from kissing her, but I didn’t. Now I’m not sure I’m glad I didn’t, but I suppose it is best I didn’t. Those were a few moments of heaven though. I’ve found the girl I want and need.

June 10, 1952:

Before leaving North Platte I sent my gal a little box. Trust me to pull a trick like this. It contained a can of Gerber’s baby food—peaches and the following verse which I thunk up all myself:

I found this in the grocery store,
It had your name upon it.
I started thinking more and more,
I’ll play a trick, doggone it.

My Baby’s name is Gerber,
She’s mighty peachy keen.
I hope she doesn’t think her lover,
Has gone clear off his bean.

You’d better save the stuff, my dear,
These prices are sky high.
Who knows but what in a future year,
It’ll be one less can we have to buy.

Grandpa loved Grandma to distraction, and together they loved each of us before we even existed. What a gift. And what a great guy.