my dad

By Joyce Szuflita
I don’t really expect you to read this eulogy to my dad, but I do hope that you read the last two paragraphs. It was his gift to my brother and I, and because it was so meaningful, it is his gift to our children, and I want to pass it on to you.

My dad passed away on March 30. He was 91. He was the energizer bunny and we thought he could make it to 100, sharp as a tack with a beautiful head of hair. He was an art teacher, librarian, King of the AV nerds, early Mac adopter, potter, jeweler, furniture builder, and photographer. He was a great breadwinner who loved his job as AV Supervisor in the Arlington County Schools and he and my mom had an enviable partnership and marriage. My mom, (a full on 70’s feminist), would sarcastically tell me, “marry the best provider you can stand”. She did way better than that and it worked out great for her. She knew how lucky she was to her dying day. He was wildly proud of her artistic career. She was a founding member of Printmakers, Inc. as well as an inaugural member of the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria Va. She is in collections all over the world. She passed away in 2018.

They met at Buffalo State Teacher’s College in the late 40’s. They studied to be art teachers at the Albright Knox Gallery. It was all abstract expressionism and mid century modern design. The story goes that he would fall asleep in Art History. She helped him pass the tests and he would help her with her perspective drawing. I seriously doubt that she needed the help. She was a smart cookie. The son a milkman from Buffalo and the daughter of an egg farmer from Kingston planned to teach art during the year and spend summers traveling. They rode up the Rhone River valley against the wind on 3 speed Raleigh bicycles. They bought a Lambretta scooter from the factory to tour Italy. They went went to Sevilla during Holy Week without a hotel reservation. Later they would take my brother and I camping in the Caribbean and touring on a freighter and a house boat and a barge.

My dad loved a good project; decorating his school library with hundreds of students’ snowflakes or rigging the coffee pot to play carols, writing epic poems about his assisted living’s dining service to the glee of the other residents or tweaking his model sailboat to crush the competition. He wasn’t super complicated. He loved my mother and he was proud to have the job of taking care of us. When she started to fade, he didn’t have any other mission than to keep her happy and comfortable. She didn’t eat much at the end and she was disoriented but he knew that she usually had a couple of good hours in the middle of he night, so every night, he would go to sleep early and wake up a 2 am, get a piece of chocolate black-out cake for her and he would keep up a monologue of stories about their travels. She was just pretty much just 100% chocolate and love at the end.

Turns out he just had garden variety pneumonia and not Covid. We couldn’t be with him because the test didn’t come back until 3 days after he passed away. He was a model patient. He passed peacefully in his sleep. He was tidy and taking care of us to the end. A couple of the last things that he did before he went to the hospital were finish his taxes and fill out the census. My brother and I joke that it was just like him to finish out the whole first quarter.

He left us a gift. He taught us how to find joy and beauty in the mundane at work and at home. He always thought of us first. When I saw how he left his life - simple, beautiful, organized, it was a huge wake up call for me. I don’t want to leave a mess for my kids. His lawyer, financial advisor and accountant all said the same thing, “You don’t know how lucky you are. He made everything simple.” I have always been a little bit lazy, a little bit cluttered. I don’t want that to be my legacy. I have spent the last two months systematically going through every account. They now all have up to date beneficiaries or Transfer on Death documents. Just one a day. They are as easy as writing your kids names. The fireproof box has a notebook that has a page for every account and fund, with current phone numbers, addresses, and passwords. We have an appointment with a lawyer to update the living will and the powers of everything, and if you have younger kids you certainly want to get professional advice. It wasn’t hard to do. Really.

We did it to honor his memory, show ourselves how much he taught us and to express our love for our kids. It had been on my list for the past 10 years. Every time I would get on a plane, I would think about how I hadn’t done it. Now I can start to clean out the apartment (the chipped dishes are gone and I have one empty drawer in the kitchen!) I feel like a huge weight is lifted. One last thing. He left us notes; little post its and notes in the margin of statements. Sometimes they were the overly helpful advice that was his hallmark, sometimes totally unnecessary sarcastic complaints about the customer service at some company. It is a joy to find them. I am going to do that too.