Pearls: Every eulogy is too late

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

As several of our readers in the immediate area might know, my father is a Parkinson’s Disease patient, and has been since his 2008 diagnosis.

Dad – Larry – is the former publisher of The Tri-County News, the King City – Stanberry – Union Star predecessor of The Tri-County Ledger, into which we last year bundled our Albany Ledger coverage into a single local news publication.

He wrote a column for over 10 years, A Wondering Mind, while sitting at the publisher’s desk for the TCN. Dad had composed a similar column years ago in his publishing and general manager’s posts he held in numerous small towns in southern Iowa. His Wondering, as opposed to the more usage-accurate Wandering, was intentional. Like my father, my mind wanders off fairly often, but usually in a curious way, seeking answers to questions that have provoked my sense of wonder.

Dad is still with us. His health has failed over the years, and he struggles physically and mentally at times. This week, I made a choice I feel like I was destined to make:

I’m not going to wait until he’s gone to say a few of the things that need to be said about him. Every eulogy is late. Only the living can truly appreciate our words of respect offered on their behalf. So here are a few of mine for my living father.

I learned to write this column by reading his. My style is different. My perspectives are my own. But writing to engage the reader and staying (as closely as possible) to the topic I choose are skills I mimicked from his own writing. He won awards for his column, and I have won a couple of them for mine. It’s my favorite task in all of journalism each week, and I owe much to the man who showed me how to believe in myself as a writer.

Before the Parkinson’s affected his posture, Dad and I were just exactly the same height. I’m all legs; he is all torso. I have joked many times that some kid – maybe one of mine – is going to hit the jackpot in terms of height. My legs plus Dad’s back is the recipe for a tall adult, I tell you.

My father taught me to embrace several of my major interests, because they were his own as well. We love to read and watch science fiction. He and I have spent many, many hours eating chili or tortilla soup and watching college football games. Dad was an English major who loved to delve into ideas more closely related to science and the more theoretical elements of the human experience. I enjoy those things, too.

He has been present in my life. I do not write this to boast or to belittle anyone who did not have the same positive experience with his or her father. But nonetheless, my did did what he believed he should: he influenced me, taught me, supported me, criticized me at times. He loves me, and it has been easy to see that he has continually involved himself in my life.

To those who have watched disease or other conditions of health rob their loved ones of certain experiences, you know that this has been a difficult journey for Dad and for our family over the past 15 years. He would tell you that lots of people have it worse, and I would agree with him.

But he hasn’t had an easy time. I never saw him happier than when he was publishing the newspaper, and he had to give it up much sooner then he wanted. I have never heard him say that he thinks his afflictions are unfair; I have many times heard him say that if it had to be someone to suffer through it, he is glad it was him, rather than one of the rest of us.

Can your heart soar and break at the same time? Yes. Yes, it can.

Matt Pearl owns and operates newspapers The Tri-County Ledger