A eulogy

I’m writing this for my children.

Children can’t preserve the memories of their parents because they don’t know their parents as people, but as their parents. What they can do is preserve their own memories of their parents, and what I can do is steward my memory of my father. It’s my memory: my sisters and my mother and his brother and his sister have theirs, but mine is for me and my children. They won’t have any more memories of him for their own, not now, so perhaps by passing on mine I can give them some account of who he was and why, for better or worse, I am the father they will remember.

My dad once told me he was an affable and well-liked child, and that seems about right. It certainly would account for the affable and well-liked man I knew. By whatever accident of heritage and up-bringing, I am neither: I am, rather, angry, and my difficult disposition has led me to reflect rather more on the nature of anger than perhaps the affable and well-liked are wont to do. In his excellent Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen wisely observed, “The really important things are the things about which men will fight.” When my dad got angry, it was about something important, whether he articulated it or not.

He retired from the State Department (the second time) in the late 1990s, right about the time the Republican Party officially gave up on any kind of philosophy of government in favor of a naked commitment to win elections by hook or by exploiting the resentments of a frightened populace. Not content with the somewhat dubious claim that government is the problem, they began suggesting government workers are the problem, somehow posing a threat to the American people. Leaving aside the fairly obvious fact that the greatest threat facing the American people is the American people, this widely-spread assertion wounded my father, who had spent his entire adult life to that point in government service. In other words, it got him mad, and when he got mad it showed all of us what was important to my father.

My dad believed, without irony, in duty. He entered the Foreign Service because the work interested him, and because he wanted to serve his country. As did many of his generation, he volunteered for the Army to avoid the draft, and did his service at the Presidio, wearing mufti, driving a sports car, and visiting San Francisco jazz clubs at night. Thus, I have a hard time imagining him as anything other than a diffident soldier, but he was serious about national service, serious enough to take his oath as an officer of the United States government in absolute sincerity. He spent his entire working life in government service because government service is necessary and important. He volunteered, and he did his duty.

So if you want to understand my father, you need to understand that his job, for a man like him, was not simply a job, but really and truly service to his country. I don’t know if that’s how he would have stated the matter, but that’s the way he was, not only with regard to his job, but with regard to everything, including Church and home. My father could never comprehend the notion that people should only do what they feel like doing, no matter how many times his children tried to persuade him of it. For my dad, you do what you’re supposed to do, with only just as much complaining as the situation warrants and no more. Life is defined by duty, and one does one’s duty.

I was a pretty emotional kid, and I think I would have liked a father who could have connected with me emotionally, although I rather doubt anyone could have successfully connected with me back then. God knows my dad tried, and he tried mostly because he had to, and he mostly failed. But what I remember isn’t his failure to be whatever it was I wanted when I was a child. I’ve mellowed with age, and the truth is, I don’t understand any more why I was the way I was. What I remember is that my dad was there. He was always there. It wasn’t the parenting “quality time” which was faddishly in vogue sometime during my teen years, but it was certainly time. He volunteered for my Boy Scout troop when that was an extremely ill-advised proposition. He came to all my school plays. He even slept in my freshman dorm room one time so he could see me as Touchstone in As You Like It. More importantly, he was there every night when I went to bed, and, later, when I came home late at night. When things got hard and my wife was pregnant with our first child and we had to sell our house, I called him and I didn’t ask him to help. I told him I needed him to help me get the house fixed up and he told me when he could come out to Denver, which is what I knew he would do. My dad was there.

My dad was an affable and likable child. “Affable,” which I didn’t think people even know is a word any more, is the adjective which most often appears in the e-mails and cards I received in the weeks after Thanksgiving. It was easy for me to get along with my dad, at least after I went to college and the stakes were lowered in our relationship. I miss him. I can’t be affable, but he never wanted me to be affable. What he wanted, and what he told me explicitly only once, was for me to do what I have to do. He was, I think, glad I ended up a pastor, although he never said so in so many words. He didn’t ask me to do my grandmother’s memorial service: someone had to, and it had to be me because I couldn’t imagine doing otherwise. I read the prayers over his body because that is what his son, who is a pastor, was duty-bound to do. That’s what I learned from my dad: you do what you have to do, your feelings on the matter be damned. 

My father was an affable man, but there was something there I could never reach. I am not an affable man, and I am that much more a difficult husband and father. My children may never reach me, so I hope they never need to. What I hope they remember is that I was there.  I hope they will be there for their children, because that is what Kingsburys do: we are there; we do our duty. What I ultimately hope my children remember is that I was there because my dad was there. He was always there.

William F. Kingsbury was a man and a person much larger than my memory can encompass. I can’t do justice to your memories of him, and now I realize I can’t do justice to mine. All I can say is this: I learned from him all I really need to know, all I really need to do, to be a father and a husband. I am what I am by God’s grace through Christ’s Cross, and I am the man I am because of my father.

I miss him.