my father's eulogy
When colon cancer picked my father's bones clean in the New Wave summer of '79, me and the surviving Goads sat in the front pew at Holy Cross Church in Springfield, PA, for his funeral mass.
The parish chose a Father Jones to recite the mass. The man pictured at left is not Father Jones, but he looks sort of similar. He's fat and bald and wears glasses like Father Jones did. I've altered the image so it looks more like Father Jones than the original priest pictured, who may have been a swell fellow for all I know. Or he may have been a child molester—I couldn't tell you.
Father Jones, who was always hugging you and mussing your hair every chance he got, had a Barbasol smell to him that could have been alcohol vapors. He ran the local Catholic Charismatic Renewal meetings, an odd 70s movement where ex-hippies, drifters, and even normal fat church people would play folk guitars and speak in tongues and fall to the ground under the bitchin' force of the Holy Spirit. They used to hold their psycho glossolalia-fests in an old building on the cemetery grounds where my father was about to be buried.
But this was a standard funeral mass, and the time came for Father Jones to deliver his eulogy. I don't remember specifics, but the essence of his sermon was that Al Goad was not a good man. For what seemed like ten minutes, he hammered on the idea that my father was a despicable weasel.
We Goads sat in our front-row pew, incredulous. This was possibly the rudest thing I've ever witnessed. If you didn't think he was a good man, let your stupid God decide. This dumb fucking ritual is for the family's benefit, not yours. As we rode to the cemetery in our rented limo, my sister Chris was crying and cursing Father Jones, while my brother John stared angrily without saying a word.
There were two funeral processions at the cemetery, and my father's auto convoy was much shorter than the endless string of cars at the other funeral. I felt bad that dad had died unpopular.
Later that day, I punched someone.
At dad's wake ceremony the night before, more than one co-worker of his from Gulf Oil Co. came up to me and said things such as, "Well, you know, your father wasn't the easiest guy to get along with," and "Al was kind of an asshole, you know."
My father was a dick—allow me to enter that on the record—but I don't know if he ever did anything as bad as Father Jones did to him that day. Even Dear Old Dickish Dad seemed to deserve something a little better than this.
So the best and most realistic eulogy I could give my father, dead for nearly a quarter-century, is to repeat what brother Johnny said about him years ago:
"Good man, terrible father."
Amen.
