Below is a draft of the eulogy I will deliver at my father’s funeral this coming Saturday. It is published here to honor his memory. He passed away at the age of 85 years and 2 hours.

He came to visit us in Philadelphia last Christmas with my sister Paige and her husband Greg. It would be the last time this traveling salesman was to travel. It was obvious then that he was on a slow but inevitable decline. As my uncle Russ, who we buried far too young in a string of far too many funerals of late, said to me: “None of us gets out of this alive.” So it was unsurprising when I got the message from my sister I had long been expecting and dreading, to drop everything and come right away.

Charles, a.k.a. Baba, Uncle Buddy, Dad, Charlie Brown, Little Honey — his father Charles senior being labeled Big Honey by my mother after both men kept answering to “Honey” — faced the indignities of hospice care with a grace and stoicism I try, and fail, to emulate in my own dealings with this world.

These are just two among many admirable qualities that evolved out of his challenging childhood: a father who struggled with alcoholic self-medication after the Depression-driven bankruptcy of a thriving family business, coupled with the early death of his father; a mother who lived in the reflected glory of opportunity lost, and never let an opportunity pass by to remind him about it. Now, we all knew my grandparents as a benevolent presence, and indeed they were for us grandchildren, but they struggled through economic deprivation and a World War to get there. Their shortcomings were the by-product of forces larger than they were, and the struggles they did not ask for but which they somehow survived shaped the character my father became.

It always shocked me every time he told us a story that revealed what a rebel he was, but I suppose he had a lot to rebel against. As a young person he once ran away to New York City, a harbinger of his peripatetic adult life and a far cry from Richmond on so many levels. In desperation, as punishment, perhaps both, his parents enrolled him in a military academy. The resolve in his eyes when I look at his picture from that time is striking. There’s a million things I haven’t done and just you wait, he seems to say. I’m thinking of suing Lin Manuel Miranda for the rights to that line.

His streak of rebellion spilled over into young adulthood. When he attended the University of Richmond, his gregariousness as a fraternity brother was the stuff of legend. The dean of students called my dad to his office to take him to task. I really have a hard time imagining him as a John Belushi character replete with a shirt emblazoned with “College” sitting in that chair, but there he was. In exchange for enlisting in the military service of his choice, the dean offered him a chance to return to school after his tour of duty. My dad never took him up on the offer to return, but he did join the Air Force and became a crack coder and radio operator.

He could still tap out Morse Code decades later without skipping a beat. He was serving at the airbase in Peshawar, Pakistan, home to planes that spied on Russia in this pre-satellite era, when the U2 aircraft piloted by Francis Gary Powers was famously shot down, and my mother rightly feared for his life as the Soviet Union may well have pondered a retaliating attack. It was while he was in Pakistan that I came into the world. When I was 9 months old, I finally got to meet my dad. It was a union lost to the amnesia of infancy. I don’t look terribly happy with this strange man holding me in the pictures commemorating the event, but once the fog of toddlerhood gave way to the lucid memories of childhood I was always pleased and proud to have him as my dad.

He eventually settled into a successful career as a sales executive in industrial adhesives. “It’s a tacky business,” he’d say. “But I think I’ll stick with it,” he’d say. My dad, I think he invented dad jokes. He was constantly pulling crazy shenanigans. One evening in Nashua, New Hampshire, we were settling in to sleep on the pull-out sofa in the living room, always a special treat when we had visitors and needed an extra bed. He comes down the stairs, wearing mom’s curler cover bonnet, a stylish little number featuring hundreds of bright blue artificial feathers. He looked like a cross between Bob Ross and Big Bird dipped in ink.

He was so tickled with himself that he could not stop laughing and neither could we. Whenever he got like this, which was often, we seriously thought he’d have a coronary. How could we explain this look to the EMTs?

But he took his job as a dad seriously. He gave, and he gave, and he gave. My sister and I, being children, took, and took, and took. About the only thing we gave him were plenty of opportunities to get mad at us, but he was slow to anger. On those rare occasions when he did lose his cool with us, oh boy, we really knew we had crossed a line. His restraint was a surprisingly effective disciplining tool. His love for us was unconditional when the conditions we created for him were less than ideal. I’ve tried, and often failed, to learn from that and pay it forward, but the persistence I did manage to snag from his collection of virtues helps me keep trying.

Persistence. A steady presence. It’s still with us and it will always be with us as long as memory will permit. My wife Maria and I made a short-lived home in Virginia when she found her first job as a newly minted midwife. While living in Fredericksburg that one year, we kept a strong Cromar tradition alive:: we sought out every good restaurant within a 50 mile radius. Our hands-down favorite discovery was Captain Billy’s Crab House, on the Maryland side of the Potomac. It’s the kind of place more properly approached by boat, though that didn’t stop us from getting there on land. It reminded us of an amalgam of places we’d been to with Mom and Dad when we’d visit them in Florida. We said, ” We have to bring them here when they come to visit, they’ll love it.”

Of course, when they did visit and we took them over the bridge for the big surprise, Mom said, “Oh, we’ve been here lots of times!” We should have known. The only real way to eat at Captain Billy’s is under the long outdoor awning facing the Potomac, with its exceptional sunset views and the busy docks full of people pulling up to eat, their boats looking like little tugs pulling a long liner up-river. You even walk a long gangway to enter the restaurant like you’re boarding a cruise ship. We walked the plank, settled into our outdoor seating, and, true to form, Dad ordered a big surf-and-turf special, which included a mess of ribs which he methodically and patiently began to clean off one-by-one.

At that time of year, it’s not uncommon for a late afternoon thunderstorm to pass through. The view of the river is so expansive you can observe what’s coming for miles. We could see dark greenish clouds gathering in the north-west way up-river. Dad continued the slow, persistent dismantling of his plate as we watched the storm approach. It came upon the restaurant shockingly fast, carried by what I’m sure must have been a nearby tornado. The fat drops of rain didn’t fall, exactly. They traveled in a path horizontal to the ground plane at light-speed. The awning was useless to protect us from the elements. Dad and I were sitting together with our backs to the wind, the backs of our shirts plastered to our skin, the fronts miraculously dry, our rain shadow protecting our food. Dad kept eating.

Our poor wives sat across from us facing into the wind, which must have been like being pelted by wet rocks. They couldn’t stay. They grabbed their drenched plates of food and ran indoors. Dad kept eating.

By now the wind was so fierce it was blowing chairs over. I kept waiting for that legendary freight train sound one is supposed to hear when a tornado arrives. Dad kept devouring his dinner, rib by rib. I tried to wait it out with him, but I eventually succumbed and went inside with Mom and Maria. Patiently, persistently, like the rock he was, Dad ignored it all. He was not going to let some trifling chaos interfere with something as critically essential to joy as these ribs. He always knew how to set priorities.

Dad weathered the storm whenever his family or his job threw chaos his way, at every stage of his long life. I think it was only after Mom passed away last year that he gave himself permission to pick up the ribs and get inside. He saw her through the wild winds of dementia and wanted to pass only after she had. That was simply the sense of responsibility he had toward his family. At some strange cellular level, there was a will for him to keep going and see her escape the storm, and only after she was safe inside did he feel it was OK to join her. Dad, you are a hard act to follow. I don’t know if I can live up to the bar you set, but you taught me how to try.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be making a long-delayed journey to Scotland, which upon my father’s passing has now transformed into a fateful mission. I will visit the Kirkton of Aboyne burial ground, the final resting place for dozens of our Cromar ancestors. On the night he died, I took a lock of Dad’s hair from the back of his head and placed it in a vial. When I visit the ancient stone slab of Peter Cromar, his fifth great-grandfather and progenitor of the Cromar line, I’ll release this small token of his mortal remains to the ground. On Peter’s gravestone, it is inscribed:

HERE LYES
IN HOPS OF A BLESSED
RESURRECTION THE DUST
OF PETER CROMAR WHO
LIVED IN KIRKTOUN OF
ABOYN HE DIED OCT 13
1770 AGED 80 YEARS

In some slightly more than symbolic way, Dad, you will be there, holding on to the same hope. It will be humbling to be the agent who helps to restore this circle with our ancestors. I’m certain you don’t mind the bad haircut that makes it possible.