How do you eulogize someone you don’t know?

Raymond J. Garlick - November 16, 1945 – March 6, 2024

How do you eulogize someone you don’t know? Someone who was so selfish that they were never honestly openhearted or vulnerable?

Most people, when a parent dies, offer examples of all they will miss: examples of advice given or support provided, or of good times remembered. That was not MY father: My father never offered advice or support and never “made memories” – there were no fishing trips, no weekends camping, no organic loving or tender moments.

However, I did learn from my father: I learned that blood is not thicker than water. I learned that marriage vows are simply meaningless words. I learned that one can choose one’s family and that the chosen family is the only family that matters. The genes that bond us are nothing more than environmental chemistry that has nothing to do with the heart. I learned that efforts to connect and to highlight personal or familial commonalities are seen only as competition or denigrated as airs of superiority. I learned that my father did not care, did not love enough to reach out.

His widow said it most succinctly to my young son, my father’s own grandson, at the dinner table so many years ago, “No – we will never be related.” And she herself currently shows the same ignorance and lack of compassion for the depth of emotion that surrounds having estranged and complex relationships with a parent, by deliberately leaving his daughter and his grandson unacknowledged on his public obituary.

And my father acquiesced to this kind of demonstration. His only family was the one she presented to him. It was the family he then chose to accept. His own children were thrown the scraps of parenting, the dredges of his unwelcomed and now unchosen fatherhood: tough love – his way or the highway – emotional manipulation. It saddens one to realize that his heart was limited to only certain children or grandchildren and that his spine was so weak he wouldn’t stand up for his own flesh and blood.

Were there good things about Ray? Probably. But I was not privy to them, nor was my son. Others were and those who were chosen were held close and supported as family. And to those of you who he kept close in his heart, may you take solace and find happiness in the memories he chose to create with you, may you be richer for it.
Kristin M (Garlick) Foerch