Eulogy

Since my mother was the oldest, she was the first to experience my granddad’s love of poetry. Over the dull roar of her little brothers being wrangled into bed by my grandmother, my grandfather would sit on my mother’s bed and recite works by Keats, Browning, Longfellow, Field and Kipling.

He had no use for Carl Sandburg, whose poems didn’t rhyme and seemed to break many of the conventions of poetry. He had, in fact, little use for anything written too far past the turn of the century. He loved the clever rhyme schemes of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the grandeur of Tennyson and the gothic imagery of Coleridge.

Those who heard my granddad recite his seemingly bottomless inventory of poems understood his passion, not just for poetry, but for life. He saw the joy and beauty of the world reflected all around him, and demonstrated this beauty to others throughout his eighty-four years on this earth.

His passion for music led to the accidental learning of two languages as a middle schooler. He wanted to hear Carmen, his favorite opera, in its original language. Since Carmen takes place in Spain, he spent three years learning the Spanish he thought necessary to understand the tormented love affair between Don Jose and the eponymous temptress of the opera. Once he was proficient in the language, he tuned in to a performance on his radio, only to discover that Carmen was in French, not Spanish. Undeterred, he adjusted his class schedule accordingly, allowing him to enjoy Georges Bizet’s magnum opus in all its glory after only a few more years of study.

My granddad had relentless sense of purpose that seems less common in this day and age. He once worked a full month without a day off, going to dental school classes in the morning & running the YMCA desk at night. He had many jobs over the course of his life: a mailman, a taxi driver, a caretaker, an assembly-line cream puff filler - and as a dentist who practiced in the town of Council Grove for 46 years.

Anyone in the Esssington family can confirm the first thing Granddad would ask you upon walking in his home was if you’d like something to eat. I have difficulty thinking of a time when I wasn’t immediately offered something from a long-simmering pot of chili or navy beans as I walked into the kitchen. His love of not only food, but of sharing, of giving - was an extension of the genuine sense of caring he felt for others. For all the times that he enlightened us with a bizarrely obscure (but almost always correct) answer in a game of trivial pursuit or simply encouraged us when we were feeling down, he knew that sometimes all we needed was a hot bowl of stew.

Even in his later years, when his memory wasn’t quite as good, his zest for life remained. My sister Emily was being honored as a finalist for an award at the University of Kansas and was scheduled to give a speech. As my grandparents and parents made the drive up from Council Grove to watch, my grandmother asked my granddad if he remembered what they were going to see. He replied, “I don’t know, but I must really want to hear it, because I brought eight hearing-aid batteries with me.”

When I was a child, and I would hear my little sisters being shepherded into bed by my father, my mother would sit on the edge of my bed and read to me the poems that my grandfather had read to her: the works of Keats, of Browning, of Longfellow, of Field, of Kipling. And in these moments when I lay halfway between waking and unconsciousness, I would feel the love that my granddad had passed onto my mother, that she in turn was passing onto me, and I understood something greater than myself: the importance and the meaning of family. For all the things that were close to his heart, this was what my granddad loved the most.

-From "Thanatopsis," one of his favorite poems:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, which moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.