It's been 992 days, 23 hours, 55 minutes, and 11 seconds since I met you...but who's counting? To say it's been a rollercoaster is an understatement. Much like Space Mountain at Disney World—our first true flying-on-a-plane vacation—I've often felt completely in the dark, being jerked around at high speed in a quite unpredictable manner. But despite this seemingly frightening situation, I am never afraid, because a team of top-notch Disney engineers has designed and tested it to meet the highest safety protocols. So in this rambling analogy that I've meticulously planned, you're the Disney engineers...or perhaps the spaceship, keeping me protected, but always moving forward...or the track, guiding me (despite my screaming) to where I need to be. But in reality, you're all the parts of Space Mountain, and all of Disney World, and all of my world.
When we first met, you probably didn't realize just how weird I was...I'm pretty good at hiding it. But even as I slowly unpeeled my layers of society-inflicted normalcy, you somehow weren't scared away. And I got to learn just how weird you were, like when out of the blue one day, you told me matter-of-factly that the word quinoa and the name Joaquin are opposites; I think that was the day I knew for sure that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. We're both children at heart; between you rewatching The Sandlot or me replaying Yoshi's Story, I'm glad that we both know how to enjoy the finer things in life. But I can take the childishness a bit too far in some ways, and I have you to thank for teaching me how to be more adult in the ways that matter, particularly—and I'm sure this will be no surprise to anyone within these walls who knows her—punctuality.
So, I vow to love you forever and all the usual wedding vow stuff, but I also vow to be even more punctual, and to never stop growing in every other possible way (except growing up) with you. To put it in a way only you will fully understand, I would swim with unprotected hair across a chlorinated swimming pool filled with glitter and embossing powder for you.
I love you.
One night when I was a young child, I had a horrific realization: everyone will die. As an innocent creature still mostly unaware of the unrelenting cruelty (but also deep beauty) of the world, my first thought was that my dad would die. So, not yet having learned to fully repress my emotions, I began to sob. My parents came in and I told them the bad news. My dad tried to comfort me, but I knew he was lying. My mom stood in the doorway and probably thought something like, "He's crying over Charlie dying? I'm the one who keeps him clothed and fed around here!"
This imaginary version of my mom was right, of course. And although my father was quite lacking in many practical areas of this shared yet fragmented dream known as society, he was an expert in the truly meaningful areas of being compassionate, loving, and above all else, patient.
My father loved to love in every sense of the word: animals, humans, art, spirituality. And his tastes in almost everything were broad and inclusive--the one exception being his literal sense of taste, which was heavily biased toward sweets. Because his enjoyments ran the gamut from highbrow to lowbrow to unibrow, please note the following list and any others I may ramble off are all incomplete, in the interests of not making this eulogy infinite.
He loved music, both listening and playing. He loved classical music, jazz, ragtime, folk, world music, new music, subversive music (like Frank Zappa), and even drug-fueled psychedelic rock, despite being a proudly abstinent man for his entire life.
He loved literature, plays, movies, stories. He loved to read and watch and listen to them, and he loved to write them. He watched A Walk to Remember multiple times, and he also watched Pink Flamingos multiple times (granted, this was only because when it was released, he happened to be working in a movie theatre--one of a multitude of jobs he dabbled in). He loved What About Bob, especially the dinner scene where Bill Murray is rhapsodically enjoying the salad. And he loved The Princess Diaries, although he felt weird being the only adult in a movie theatre of mostly tween girls.
He loved The Big Bang Theory. He loved Monty Python's Flying Circus. He loved Da Ali G Show, to the point where he once was laughing so hard he couldn't breathe, and in an attempt to catch his breath he tried to leave the room but fell onto the hearth, giving himself a black eye. The next day, his coworkers earnestly inquired whether his wife had hit him, which he gleefully recounted to us that night at dinner, much to my mom's annoyance.
He loved animals, and people, and Christian Science, and, paradoxically, hospitals. He enjoyed interacting with the other guests in the psych ward. He truly contained multitudes of multitudes, in every sense of the word.
He loved making people laugh. My favorite recurring bits of his would happen in the car. One was him randomly yelling "Poooop!", which my juvenile brain found (and still finds) hilarious. Another was that every time we got onto Route 22, he would say, "Ah, we're back on Route 22. Two two's! One two followed by another two." Now that I'm driving on that road myself, I'm realizing that it may have served the secondary purpose of attempting to distract himself from the absolute insanity of the constantly merging traffic that attacks you from all sides.
When Dad started hospice care, our nurse told us that it was a beautiful gift that we were giving Charlie by caring for him. But to me, it was the reverse: caring for my dad was a gift that he was giving to me. Despite all the difficulties, the times when it felt hopeless or pointless, I would always be reminded of the value of our hard work when he smiled.
One of our rituals during this last chapter of his life was saying our goodnight prayer, Mary Baker Eddy's "Little Children's Prayer". I'd now like to recite it, with its lyrical interpretation as given by Charles. If you know the original prayer, feel free to join in:
Father-Mother God
Mommy-Daddy God
Loving me
Yahoo; loving all of me
Guard me when I sleep
Garden when I sleep
Guide my little feet
Guard my little prayer
Up to thee!
Up to me!
When you strip away all the layers of artifice that we euphemistically call a personality, you are left with the essence of a person: their empathy. As Charlie began to lose his intellect, it was supremely difficult for him and everyone close to him. I often felt anger at his lapses in logic, his nonsensical turns of phrase, the parts of him I thought added up to result in the man I loved. But as more and more of those parts disappeared, he gave me the greatest and most important lesson I have ever learned: that love is all you need. I guess I should've listened a bit more intently to that Beatles song.
The perfect example of this, and my favorite note I have ever received, was written by him on a scrap of paper in 2017. It reads:
"dear Nathan,
Thank you
for
all your
support, love
and good humor
Dad"
I have this note on my desk, and I pick it up and read it often; it always lifts my spirits. But despite reading it countless times, I just noticed something: the words "good humor" are underlined. So, intentionally or not, Dad left me with one last joke: he was talking about ice cream.
I love you Dad.