Today’s my grandpa’s funeral. Here’s the eulogy I shared:

Richard Coursey was a member of this community for 90 years. He attended Tracy Elementary, where his mom was the first PTA president; working at the A+P before enlisting in the Army during Korea; raising five kids over the course of a 50-year marriage to Mary while being a union painter and a devoted diner visitor, always with an extra stomach for dessert.

If you’re here, you probably already knew all of that. For me, part of knowing grandpa was also knowing he could sometimes be….brusque. Particular, let’s say. Demanding. I don’t know all the details, but I know that he at times did things that hurt people, even if they are not what he intended to do.

I’m not here to try to excuse or explain any of that, but I hope to offer what has helped me reconcile how someone can inflict pain while also being the loving, thoughtful, resourceful grandpa I knew.

I look to books to help me understand. Grandpa devoured books as well, mostly about the natural world and history, seeking to understand how we got to where we are and what makes the world run. I, more often, turn to novels to understand how people and relationships work. One of my favorite authors for this task is George Eliot, whose characters are so finely rendered you can recognize people you know in them, even at 150 years distance.

Recently, I encountered a book that said much of Eliot’s work is a celebration of “anonymous heroes,” the people whose names history may never know or remember, but who have made possible the world we enjoy. The doctors, painters, farmers, fathers, friends who make mistakes, sometimes repeatedly, and we all find a way to live alongside those missteps.

When it comes to anonymity, grandpa would never let us forget anyone else’s names. He spoke about his friends of decades, his mom and dad and aunts, his time in the army, even my sister and dad. But the more I thought about this concept, the more I realized grandpa rarely put his own name forward. It was sometimes even hard to get him to talk about himself and not just his relationship to other people. For example, he always had the radio on in his car, usually to a top 40 station. I found this so curious. Why music, why THAT music? I never got an answer. He even shrugged off questions about what he liked to listen to when he went to clubs and met grandma. He’d happily talk about taking the trolley to pay the electricity bill for his mom, and then going to the movies. But less about the movies or his own enjoyment of them. More about the interactions, the routes of travel and work and helping his mom, while also picking up a candy.

Instead, he expressed himself in tending to the necessaries of life. The daily tasks. The _work_ of living. The work of making a life with the people you love. Grandma fed everyone alongside a bountiful helping of good cheer and support. Grandpa quietly shoveled walkways, left bags on door knobs filled with garage sale goodies and food, went on countless visits to his sister who remembered him as “Pert,” to a wife who’s grave he carefully tended, to a daughter across the state for companionship, and yes, a little shopping. He found numerous ways to take care of those around him and to honor the lives of those who passed before him. His reliability and his consistency gave a basis of support that I know helped me grow in life, and I suspect many others, too.

From him, I got an appreciation for routines, a desire to always be prepared (complete with a ready pile of both napkins and loose change), and a drive to not waste things, plus a house _full_ of knick knacks. I’ll never forget the pile of candles in my mom’s house that my grandpa had picked up from garage sales, probably enough to last till my own grandkids. I still have no idea what to do with so may Parisian themed items or other trinkets, but I value knowing he was thinking about me to look out for those items, how front of mind his family always was, even if we didn’t necessarily _need_ the physical manifestation of those thoughts.

From him, I learned ways to carry people and your love for them with you. I learned to be fiercely independent, to be able to take care of myself, but also to be generous with my time and, well, I’m still working on this, but embrace interdependence, the ways we have to give and accept support from one another. I will admit, I was worried how much grandpa would fight moving into a more fully interdependent stage of life, but he seems to have quietly accepted it, grateful that his son Michael was able to move in and support him in this last year and that his other children were able to support Uncle Mike in providing that safety net.

The anonymous heroes may never have names on buildings, or, outside of novels, even show up in any books. Their legacy is the families and communities they sustain, the worlds they make possible through embodying our duty to each other. It’s a legacy of people who other people depend on, and who can be depended upon, whether that be through family, work, food, or politics. I see grandpa’s legacy in being aware that in all the things we do, we can always share more, even the little bits we find on the ground; we can always look out for ways to support one another; and we can _always_ box up those leftover french fries for some hungry crows.

(thanks to Gustavo Martinez for giving me feedback on this draft)

Last modified on October 23, 2018