I spent most of today consolidating old files from the various hard drives I’ve filled up over the last five years. I’m not done yet, in part because, when I came across a file called “eulog.txt,” dated 30 November 2003, I got a little distracted. I remember writing it. I had come home for the Thanksgiving holidays, nearly finished with my first quarter at Stanford, save for dead week and exams. I was excited for so many reasons—I was making new friends; I had elaborate plans for the CS106A programming contest; from what I could tell, the writing style I’d developed in high school was serving me well in all but one of my classes; I’d just begun dating someone. But I was equally exhausted. I fell asleep almost immediately in my childhood bed.
My parents went out of their way to let me sleep. They quietly unpacked my suitcase and washed my clothes. Then they put my clean clothes back in my suitcase and packed their own suitcases. By the time I stirred the following afternoon, the family minivan was ready to leave. “We’re going to Auburn,” my mother said. “We thought you might not be able to sleep if we told you last night.”
Because I had mentioned the programming contest to my parents, they had already contacted a friend of theirs who was willing to lend me a laptop. That laptop was a luxury in several ways: it kept me distracted during the four-hour drive to my Grandparents’ house, letting me smear my freshman enthusiasm for computer science across a series of events I was not ready to comprehend, and it also gave me a means of recording, of shaping and reshaping, my impressions of those events. After more than a few hard drive migrations and reformattings, the eulogy I wrote for my grandfather on the way home is still, somehow, thankfully, intact.
Here is what I wrote. The last sentence echoes Romans 8:28, a favorite verse of his. My omissions are deliberate.
John Cooper Ball, the second of my grandfathers to pass away in less than a year, took almost half of my life to decide he’d done with this world. That’s one way of putting it, at least. For the last year or so, there couldn’t have been much decision involved in his persistence. And at least for several years early on, there was still quite a lot of hope — no reason to think a decision might have to be made about whether to go on living. Even when hope finally gave way to inevitability, decision or not, Grandaddy had a will within him — and, one has to say, a strong one. Our fortunes can shift with very little warning between allowing us to believe that we have some control over what happens to us and reminding us that the important decisions have already been made, that we are only acting out the script we’ve written. If it is mostly beyond us to know when that shift occurs within ourselves, it is quite impossible to detect it in anyone else. But as soon as we begin to talk about inevitabilities, we have gotten away from what was wonderful about John Ball.
It is certainly a consolation that John’s death brought a long-awaited end to his suffering. Anyone who cared for him shares in his relief. But there will be someone here today who says that John Ball is still alive in the hearts of those who loved him, that he is dead only in the body, not in the memories that remain of him. To that person, or perhaps group of people, I would make a very sincere suggestion: instead of denying the finality of his death with those particular words of comfort, if you remember what John was like nine years ago or any time before, tell a story about him. Don’t stop with just one, either. Tell every story you can remember. When a person dies suddenly, when death comes as a shocking reminder of who a person was only momentarily before he was not, then, perhaps, it is enough to trust that his memory lives on. When a person fights death as long as John has, however, we remember him ill if we let our last recollections of his misery stand as his epitaph. Now that John’s struggle is over, it is time for us to rebuild him, to remember, if we can, the man we began to lose eight years ago.
When we have finished reminiscing, I dare speculate, we will have furnished in John’s rightful memory the image of a man whose sense of humor neither the war, nor the loss of a child, nor even a debilitating stroke could quite kill. As long as there was a breath in Grandaddy’s lungs, he could start a conversation, make a friend of anyone. He was a great coiner of phrases. He was a pack-rat, a tireless spirit. There are more stories to tell than I have time (or enough experience) to recollect, but since I fear it may go unmentioned, I ask that each of you remember especially a story that belongs not only to John Ball: the story of how a man in perfect health works outside one summer afternoon, comes in for a drink of water, and sits down to rest. A little while later, the phone rings, but he doesn’t hear it. He never stands up again without help. It happens that way. All things work together.
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