Edward E. O’Neill – eulogy
Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013Thank you to those who are here because you knew my father. And thank you to those who are here not because you knew him but because you know Alice or someone else in the family. Those of you who knew him will miss him. Those of you who didn’t know him missed out.
Last summer, a few days before he had surgery, my dad was reading the newspaper and he told me that he didn’t want one of “those flowery obituaries.” I asked, “Do you mean the kind where it says, ‘After showing the courage of Superman, the moral strength of Atticus Finch and the physical strength of Hercules, Edward was carried aloft into the immaculate unknown by a flock of angels on a gilded chariot’”? “Yeah, nothing like that,” he said. And I promised we wouldn’t do that.
So when we wrote his obituary, which appeared in Sunday’s Cape Cod Times, we kept that promise and stuck to just the facts.
But he didn’t make me promise anything about his eulogy. So forgive me, Pops, if I talk about something other than the biographical highlights, such as the pride you had in being an Eagle Scout or your service in Korea with the Air Force during the Korean War.
Some people think that accounting is a dry profession. While my dad enjoyed working with numbers, what he really liked about being an accountant was the time he spent with clients, when he would catch up on their lives and maybe swap a few jokes. My dad had a vault-like mind for remembering jokes and that special gift of pacing that the best storytellers have.
I know many people who have told me that a meeting with him helped save their business – or in a few cases, prevented them from starting a business that was almost certain to fail. One friend who saved a bundle after he started preparing her tax return sent him a note on a little yellow post-it sticker. It said, “You’re a tax rock star.” He displayed that note on a kitchen cabinet for years.
My dad loved cars. When he was 19, he bought a 15-year-old Dodge for 100 bucks. Over the years, he owned more than 70 cars, including his favorites: a Porsche 911 and a 1974 XJ12L Jaguar. As much as he loved being an accountant, it was hard to beat his previous job with Transatlantic Motors, where he could buy a car, have fun with it for a few months, and then replace it with another lightly used trade-in that caught his eye.
A few years back when the Scion LeBox had just hit the streets, he took a Mercedes Benz logo and attached it to the front of his Scion, just to confuse people. He later used Velcro to attach Mercedes logos to the hub cabs of his Toyota RAV4, which would be his last car.
When we picked out a casket, I had figured it would be a traditional wood-grain style. But my brother Barry noticed a silver one that reminded him of a sports car – and we all knew that was the way to go. If you look closely, you’ll see that we glued one of those Mercedes hubcap logos to his casket. He would be happy to know that he’s going out in style.
When my dad was a young man, he was of the mindset that the father was the breadwinner and the mother took care of the kids. But over the years, he learned something – and Alice had a lot to do with this – that he didn’t learn from his own parents: how to openly display his love for his family. It didn’t matter whether you were a relation by blood, marriage or adoption. All of his children and their spouses and their children were treated the same.
A few weeks before last Christmas, Alice asked their children and grandchildren to write him a letter instead of sending a gift.
The cards and letters mentioned many things: births and birthdays, card games and Pinewood Derby cars, romping in the living room and Halloween costumes and dance recitals, phone calls that helped close the miles and included just the right words on a bad day, Red Sox games and Patriots games (it was a long wait but they both finally won the big game during his lifetime), burgers on the deck and Ed’s spaghetti, first communions and graduations and weddings, funerals and the healing moments that come after. They mentioned the thousands of photos he took, and how those photos will always remind us of accomplishments to look back on and loved ones to cherish.
I wrote about a summer afternoon six or eight years ago when I stopped by his house. He was cleaning the garage and had found a football. We stood in the driveway for half an hour, tossing the ball back and forth while we had a rambling conversation. I don’t remember what we said, but I’ll always remember how good it felt that day to be connected to him.
One of his sons mentioned my dad’s favorite bits of advice: “All the other drivers are crazy.” “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” “Don’t spend money to save on taxes.” All the kids knew the guiding principle of life under Dad’s roof: “My house, my rules.” And then there were the many nights when he was ready to go home from a family gathering. He would walk toward the door and say in a loud, gruff voice … “goodnight, Alice.”
One granddaughter wrote, “Whenever I hear your name, a smile comes on my face.” Another granddaughter wrote, “You have showered us with love, compliments, encouragement and the faith that we have needed to succeed.” One grandson called him a perfect role model and said, “I hope to one day become as strong and caring a man as you.”
I’ll close with what Alice wrote on her card. “One of my most cherished memories of our life together is when you took my hand in yours, on our first date, and captured my heart forever. I love you, now and for eternity.”
