Eulogy for a Great Man

I just finished writing my grandfather's eulogy. If it seems a little slap-dash, it's because my grandmother told me forty-five minutes ago that people were speaking tonight at the viewing, not tomorrow at the funeral.



For Opa
27 April, 2007

When I was three years old, I went skiing for the first time. To be perfectly honest, I kind of remember hating it at first. The first time I ended up with my face buried in the snow, I was ready to quit. My poor, exhausted parents handed me over to Opa at some point that day. And that’s when I became a skier.

Opa didn’t only teach me to ski. He taught me how to ride a bicycle, how to play tennis, and how to drive—although the success of that last lesson might be considered questionable. At the Amigo Air Show, Opa taught me why you saw the airplanes before you heard them. I may have been the only six-year-old at Western Hills to consider “sonic boom” part of her vocabulary. One summer in Ruidoso, Opa sat my sister Lindsay and me down to teach us about good oral hygiene. When he thought we weren’t listening, he popped out his bridge and said: “See? This is serious stuff I’m telling you.” I haven’t skipped brushing my teeth since.

When I was a teenager, Opa could still beat me downhill on skis or on the obstacle course on one of the hiking trails in Lincoln County. He could do my high school math and science homework better than I could, even though he was fifty-plus years out of high school. We talked politics and philosophy and religion. After I left for college, we didn’t see as much of each other as we once had, but whenever I was home from my pristine Ivy League university, where they make you think that there are no people in this world who are smarter than you are, I still marveled at how amazingly brilliant my grandfather was. If I live to be half as smart, or half as worldly, as my Opa was, I’d consider myself luckier than most.

A year ago, I turned in my honors thesis at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a 142-page endeavor, called Mosaico: a book filled with my love for El Paso, Texas, a place that had seen generation after generation of Iveys. Opa was very much a part of that work. He’s almost pervasive in it—even when he’s not mentioned explicitly. But one story was about him, especially. It was about his love of flying, and his love of airplanes even after he stopped flying them. When I was looking for a title for the story, I came across Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “The Ladder of St. Augustine,” and that’s where the eventual title came from: what better way to honor my amazing, airplane-designing grandfather, than by calling the story “The Heights by Great Men, Reached and Kept”?

The poem is beautiful, and I’d like to share the last few stanzas of it with you now, if I may. I can’t think of a more fitting tribute to Opa, who is now doubtless soaring at heights higher than even he could have imagined:

We have not wings, we cannot soar;
    But we have feet to scale and climb
By slow degrees, by more and more,
    The cloudy summits of our time.

The mighty pyramids of stone
    That wedge-like cleave the desert airs,
When nearer seen, and better known,
    Are but gigantic flights of stairs.

The distant mountains, that uprear
    Their solid bastions to the skies,
Are crossed by pathways, that appear
    As we to higher levels rise.

The heights by great men reached and kept
    Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
    Were toiling upward in the night.

Standing on what too long we bore
    With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,
We may discern—unseen before—
    A path to higher destinies.

Nor deem the irrevocable Past,
    As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If, rising on its wrecks, at last
    To something nobler we attain.