Eulogy Delivered by Matt Connolly, III three years ago.
Thank you, Father Finnegan, for this Mass. Thank you, Joe, Kristin, and Maureen, for your readings. Thank you, Allyn and Erica, for this music. And thank you, Tatiana, for your words. Words take on new meaning in settings like this – words like “thank you” and “gratitude.” To St. Ignatius Parish and to everyone who is here, thank you for being here, for your words that are guiding us.
And gratitude toward my Dad – for the good example he set. My Mom said, “How can one person be so much?”
My Dad was born on May 1, 1939; Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President. Four months later, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began. On November 13th of that same year, a girl named Maria Vozniuk was born in Maydan Labun, Ukraine, 7,025 kilometers east of Boston.
The Wizard of Oz premiered on August 15, 1939, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published on April 14, with its first line, “TO THE RED COUNTRY and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”
Theo, the oldest grandchild, has a deep and sustained knowledge of World War II, the devastating conflict that began four months after his grandfather’s birth. THe and his grandfather spent many hours discussing the war, the countries involved, the European front and the Pacific Front, and his grandfather would get up from the table or hang up the phone, and say, what a remarkable intellect Theo has; how much he knows about history.
My mother remarked last week that she had been thinking recently about how much my father had built. He was not a carpenter by trade, but he built fireplace mantles and bookshelves. He built the steps to the canoe in the salt-marsh. He built tables and door frames. Always carefully and with attentive handiwork. As we look around the beautiful wooden mill-work of this fine church, where both of my grandparents, who lived just around the corner from here, had their funeral Masses, it’s genuinely striking how much my father built. Not just solid, physical structures in wood, but living, abstract, solid aspects of so many of us here present.
My Dad, a trial lawyer and career prosecutor, had a love for words, and perhaps, as is rare among people, a love especially for other people’s words; he loved to read. On his last night, October 7-8, his third grandchild, Matthew, called him on the phone to read Chapter 10 in the Valley of Adventure, published when my Dad was eight years old, as Matthew is now, and one of the many books my Dad and Matthew read together, or Matthew read to my Dad; it was a book my Dad read as a child, in a home which his mother filled with her love of poetry and literature.
The copy of Valley of Adventure, with the spine held to the binding by two layers of tape, and some of the pages folded in, that Matthew is reading, is the actual book my father had, and kept from, his own childhood. Books were vital to my Dad. He wrote, “At Boston College I was an indifferent student majoring in accounting doing enough to get by. I then went on to be a Marine officer for three years with my primary job being that of a disbursing officer. After a tour in Japan I was stationed at Beaufort, South Carolina. After I arrived there, I found myself getting very bored living in the bachelor officer quarters. Looking for relief I went into a bookstore and picked up a Dickens novel. I started reading it. Then I read another and other books of fiction and nonfiction. I became addicted to reading, often staying up all night doing it. I did so without recognizing that for the first time in my life I was really getting an education.”
For my Dad’s last two nights, as he lay in the hospital bed, Matthew’s strong voice over the phone read the book Valley of Adventure, and the words of the parrot, Kiki, “Kiki, who was still up on the blackened beam, sulking, was annoyed to see him again. ‘Wipe your feet,’ she said severely. ‘And how many times have I told you to shut the door?’”
Whenever Matthew read about Kiki, the parrot, he laughed and his grandmother laughed, too.
My Dad laughed all the time with his grandchildren; my Dad loved to make people laugh. My Dad loved people; he had a playful sense of life. On a walk in Siesta Key Village in Florida, or in Falmouth, or even on European trips in cities where he did not speak the language, when he ran into a stranger, he would say something funny, and it would invariably make the stranger laugh. Humor requires seeing the world as another person does, and anticipating how the other person will react. My father was good at that.
Cora, his granddaughter, shares this sense of humor; recently the school librarian called her house to tell her parents how much she appreciates Cora’s presence in the library, checking out books and printing stickers online; she said Cora is kind and has a flair for the hilarious. Cora’s grandfather loved those traits in Cora, as well.
My Dad loved to sing. When, as children, we were on long car trips, we were captive to these songs, but also captivated, and loved to sing along.
Lindbergh what a flying fool was he
Lindbergh his name will live in history
Over the ocean he flew all alone
Gambling with fate and great dangers unknown
My Dad was careful to always remember how young we children were, and to teach us songs appropriate for our age and maturity. His top hits included:
I’m a rambler, I’m a gambler, I’m a long way from home,
And if you don’t like me, well, leave me alone.
I’ll eat when I’m hungry, I’ll drink when I’m dry,
And if the moonshine don’t kill me, I’ll live till I die.
My Dad was cool. These car trips with the kids were in a large, blue Chevy station wagon, and in an era innocent of car seats, there were sleeping bags (the old, cloth-blanket type) spread for us kids in the flatbed at the back of the car. But my Dad didn’t always roll in such a clunky way. Early on, he drove a black British sport car, a sleek, classic Triumph TR3, with its rugged sidescreen of removable plexiglass side curtains, an open two-seater; the way the leather interior enveloped you as a kid in its smell; a true roadster with very responsive and forgiving handling; it rode so close to the road that from the passenger seat you could have put your hand out and literally touched the fast-moving pavement of the country road’s macadam surface, in Poland, New York, where my Grandfather had 270 acres.
My Dad was an officer in the marines, and trained at Quantico, Virginia, famed for its boot camp and humid subtropical climate. He was stationed in Japan, where he was the disbursing officer, and the enlisted men, who would spend all their money before the week was over, would come to my Dad and plead for an advance. Advances were strictly against the rules. My father often granted them. As a prosecutor my Dad was integral to an office, not far from here in Dedham, committed to enforcing law carefully, fairly, and innovatively. The office pioneered victim witness advocacy and stern prosecution of domestic violence. When John Naimovich, a twenty-three year veteran of the Massachusetts state police, was framed in order to protect the identity of an FBI informant, my father took the stand as a witness for the defense in the federal court trial, and Trooper Naimovich was acquitted.
My Dad loved music. He loved Bizet’s Carmen, and Mozart. He liked Jane Olivor’s album, First Night, that I remember him playing years ago, over and over again. Her rustic, essential voice as she sang:
I look at the world that I’ve conquered
I’ve won every spin of the wheel
I get everything I go after
You ask me how does it feel?
I tell you I’d trade the moon
For a string with an orange balloon
And the days when my only dream
Was a dish of vanilla ice cream
Give me one more chance at the midway
Let me laugh and be gay as a clown
Give me back the world I remember
One more ride on the merry-go-round
On Cape Cod there is a large meadow, where the air is fresh, where the clouds are huge as in childhood memories, the grasses are amazing and in their subdued dullness hold such bursting color in the rays of daylight, and where in evening the sunsets are spectacular. We would walk there often, every day if we could.
Here is where the birds, books, and walking paths come in. Here is my Dad’s ability to tailor a storyline to an audience, to create relatable, accessible ritual. Here is the ineffable, exquisite infinite in the routine. Here is the blessing and necessity of the pond’s surface, that tiny skin of transparency on which the fallen leaves float and the water bugs walk.
My Dad was a great context-maker. Like great artists, he was able to efface the designer in the design; he was a great artist of the passing day. He created the spaces in which the plants of human spirit grow; he was the greenhouse in which human stories lined, among lime trees and shedded orange peels, the citrus immediacy of the hour.
On the long childhood car trips, my Dad also liked to sing another song, and we sang along:
Oh, we ain’t got a barrel of money,
Maybe we’re ragged and funny,
But we’ll travel along
Singing a song
Side by side.
I don’t know what’s coming tomorrow,
Maybe it’s trouble and sorrow,
But we’ll travel the road
Sharing our load
Side by side.
Through all kinds of weather,
What if the sky should fall,
Just as long as we’re together,
It really doesn’t matter at all.
Once, my Dad was sitting with my Mom, sister, and nephew, Matthew, at a diner-style breakfast restaurant in Sarasota. When they asked for the bill, the waitress said the bill had already been paid by a woman who had been sitting across the aisle, and was moved by what she had observed of my father’s rapport with his grandson.
My father loved to go for walks with my mom, in that large meadow where we were spending covid on Cape Cod, or in the wildlife preserve, with basking alligators under the bridge, in Myakka, Florida. How many trees and shrubs did he plant with my mom, how many wheelbarrows of dirt did he bring to the vegetable garden, how many times did he stare out the window into the salt-marsh with her, is that an egret, a heron, an osprey, there, in the distance? Is that a deer, or maybe a fox, and he would take out the binoculars to find out. He took wonderful care of his family, and was exemplary in his support for our mom. He would not “beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly.”
My Mom and my Dad were a good team; he, from Boston and the city accenting his walk, she with the enormous rural expanses of Ukraine in her blood; her spring and strong resilience to launch each morning with a refreshed energy; she with her knowledge of season and seasoning, her style and tenacity, and he with his easy-rolling embrace of American mores and mainstreams. He praised my mother, her judgment, and respected her guidance, and as they discussed the news, he was the one to make sense of current events in their historical context.
He liked the film, Casablanca, with its line, “Play it, Sam.” I think it’s impossible to watch that film without being struck by Ingrid Bergman’s naturally intense humanity, and pressure-cauldron grace. My Dad saw a similar grace and humanity in my Mom. Her innate dignity. In Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman’s character, Ilsa, says, “It was your cause too. In your own way, you were fighting for the same thing.” My parents set a remarkable example of common cause.
My Dad’s loss is irreparable; it is shattering and immense. Still, as we go forward now without him, we know his presence and respond to his good counsel because of the many ways and times he has been present in our life, conditioned our reactions, and shaped our character. Because he understood life, and how to share it, and because he loved selflessly, putting the other person first, we now can access his perspective as we walk the road without the warming sun of his presence, in the meadows on Cape Cod, or in places we have yet to discover, with alligators under the bridge.
My Dad was born in Boston, or should I say, through my Dad, Boston was born in us. He was proud of America, proud to be a Democrat. He believed, passionately, in the rule of law.
Among his last words were the injunction to Love Everyone.
But what does that mean? How does one love anyone at all, never mind everyone? When love is exactly what’s needed in moments like this. Fortunately we have a lifetime of his example. Like everything in life, the proof is in the details, the daily, gritty details, like a leaven, like yeast, and the amazing baker my Dad became during covid, ordering flour on Instacart and turning it into not just the bread we lived on, but fantastic, delicious bread, East European rye and French baguettes.
My Dad liked to go to Larz Andersen Park with his grandchildren. He liked to go with them to the Museum of Fine Arts. Theo and he could walk for endless hours among the mummies and other exhibits, the beautiful paintings and vivid objects through which the past is still here. The first night last week my nephew, Matthew, was reading Valley of Adventure over the phone to my Dad in the hospital, he read chapters 7, 8, and 9. Chapter 7 begins, “SOON the stars filled the sky. An owl hooted, and the wind whispered something in the trees overhead.” At one point, my brother-in-law, John, made a funny remark. “No joking when we’re reading,” Matthew sternly rebuked him. This made my mother really laugh.
Of course, there are times when humor is inappropriate. There are times when we don’t try to get through to others by whatever means will bring them joy, so often by humor. But of such times, my Dad saw very few.
Jane Oliver sang:
Here in the cold of the winter
I cling to a fragment of May
I’ll trade you the world I have treasured
For a moment of one yesterday
Give me one more chance at the midway
Let me dance with my feet off the ground
Give me back the world I remember
One more ride on the merry-go-round
Here in the cold of the winter
The laughter is gone from the breeze
I’ll trade all the songs I have sung
For the sound of the birds in the trees
Give me one more chance at the midway
Let me dance with my feet off the ground
Give me back the world I remember
One more ride on the merry-go-round
Give me one more chance at the midway
Let me laugh and be gay as a clown
Give me back the world I remember
One more ride on the merry-go-round
We are grateful to all of you for being here and sharing your warmth during this difficult time. We hope you will join us afterward to share your reflections and celebrate my Dad’s wit.