Eulogy for Charles McMaster Eesley

Thanks everyone for being here. Clearly, this is a sad day which I had hoped would not come so soon. However, knowing dad’s character and the gene for dark, often inappropriate humor that he inherited from my grandmother, I know that he would want us to celebrate his life and crack a few jokes, rather than being too solemn and melancholy. Actually, he’d probably want us to take a break from all this and check CNBC for how the stock market is doing today.

It’s impossible to recount all of the fun moments I shared with my father. So I want to just share a few of the key moments, and the lessons that I will always carry with me as a result.

He’d spend hours playing sports with me and coming to all of my games and practices. Although Dad would tell me that after Vietnam, he never, ever had any desire whatsoever to go “camping” again… we did spend a lot of time in the outdoors, especially around the house that my grandfather designed, tending to the orchard my grandfather had planted, cutting firewood, shoveling the driveway, or rebuilding the small, red bridge my grandfather had originally built. Rather than exercise, my dad believed in home-improvement activities. When I wanted a weight set for Christmas one year, he joked with me that he’d find me some firewood to chop if I wanted a workout.

Because Dad pulled a lot of his own antics in college and high school, he was very patient with mine. Like the time as a kid when I wanted him to see that the pond in the backyard was frozen over enough that I could walk across it. When I got too self-assured and jumped up and then fell in and nearly froze, he pulled me out of my boots, still stuck in the mud on the bottom to this day and helped me up the hill. Or the time when I set off a firework and it accidentally went into the pine tree and he had to run for the fire-extinguisher to put it out. He was always very patient with me during the stupid things that I did growing up.

Dad valued this church community very highly and also had tremendous respect for our neighbors out on Highland Ridge Rd. He taught me to choose my friends wisely. Our nearest neighbors were over a hundred yards away, but John and Peggy Arnold were a thousand times closer to us in times of need than my neighbors since, who lived only feet away. John Arnold came and lent a helping hand on many occasions, and in emergencies such as when Dad flipped the tractor over on himself. The lessons on life and hard work that I learned in their house from their family complemented the lessons I learned from Dad and have been valuable to me ever since.

When he wasn’t watching football or checking his stocks, Dad would put on classic rock. His only prized possession was the stereo and record player which I think was his first purchase after getting back from Vietnam. The music that he loved — most of all the Beatles and the Rolling Stones — was rooted in and inspired by a very specific time in history. He complained throughout my college years that I had stolen his CD collection, which I later gave to my cousin Nooreen, so it took him years and many phone calls to finally recover those CDs.

Besides an appreciation of the obviously far superior music of the 60s and 70s (before I was born), I learned his appreciation for history and for learning about the great world events and political struggles that shape our lives, often in ways that are outside of our control, just as Vietnam did for his life. Most long conversations with dad would wind their way eventually back to what he experienced in Vietnam from 70–71 and the smart-ass comments that probably nearly got him court-marshaled. While visiting my friend Mike in Saigon, I called him via Skype. He told me his stories of being in that city, but he had absolutely no desire to visit again after leaving. When I complained of the humidity he told me I missed the wonderful experience of the monsoons.

Finally, a strong memory is our relationship with my grandparents. Grandpa always had some interesting new wood-carved toy that also taught some physics principle. I would go to Grandma’s house after school and dad would join us after work to have dinner together. In her final days, dad patiently sat with her and fed her every day. It was a tribute, both to his loyalty and to the figurehead that my grandmother was in our family. It was her wisdom, far-sightedness and patience in investing that inspired him to become a stockbroker, funded my grandparents’ travel in retirement, and paid for a large part of my education. Phone calls with dad always included an update of how the stock market was doing recently and a request that I use my education to make it go up again soon.

I failed to inherit the full dose of the wicked sense of humor my dad got from my grandmother, that’s why I had to become a professor where the bar for being funny is sufficiently low. Dad came to visit me in Boston one year and was the only passenger on the leg of the flight from Parkersburg to Cleveland. He told me that when the stewardess gave him his Coke and peanuts and asked if there was anything else he wanted, he suggested a dance down the empty plane’s aisle. He relayed her response to me, “Cute, but no go.”

I think his greatest gift to me was not forcing any specific career path on me. When I asked, he would simply say, “Do whatever makes you happy, focus on your education, don’t repeat my mistakes,” and in more reflective moments, he would add, “take an interest in the people who you meet, and you’ll have plenty of opportunities,” and leave it at that. I realized later that in his own way, he was teaching me to think for myself and to make my own decisions in life.

Like many children, I didn’t always recognize my father’s wisdom growing up. However, I will always remember my father as someone who faced and overcame many challenges and struggles in life and taught me to do the same with a sense of humor, hard work, planning, and optimism for a better future. I’m forever grateful that he taught me to value my education, to think for myself and to be independent. The best lessons he could have left me with.

Following his love of history in recent days I’ve been watching the Ken Burns series on the Roosevelts. I was so moved by it, I wanted to end with a quote that I think applies to my dad equally as well … and really to all of us in one way or another in our own lives.

The documentary ends with Ernest Hemingway’s words: “Everyone is broken by life, but afterward many are strong in the broken places.”

I think that dad was broken by life and the legacy of his time in Vietnam and yet, he fully maintained his sense of humor and ability to laugh at it all, telling me when I saw him towards the end that he had been meaning to lose some weight, just hadn’t occurred to him that it’d be in the form of his foot. In his own way, he did become strong and wise in the broken places. He passed along part of that strength to me and he will be missed.

I want to thank everyone here who helped, shared in his good humor, and to invite you to remember his life by visiting the places around town that held special importance for him — the track at Marietta Middle School, the house on Highland Ridge, my grandmother’s house on 7th Street, and of course any TV in town that you can find that can be tuned to CNBC to check the stock market.