Some Catching Up to Do

I just haven't had the time to get the posts done! I had saved this as a draft several weeks ago and haven't had the time to finish and post it with all the work paperwork lately.

My catching up starts here with the eulogy I had written about my father for his funeral. After my week long trip to Missouri in late August, he had again beat the odds and had lived just about a month longer than we were told he would.
But finally his body gave out and he passed away on September 25, 2011.  We just weren't able to return to Missouri for the funeral but our daughter Laura did attend for us. I wrote the following which was read at the funeral as were comments from all the brothers and sons. I was given the audio of the services and a copy video collage used. It was very nice, and we really wish we could have attended.

In Memory Of My father

So here I am, the oldest son, yet I probably knew Clifford, my dad, the least amount of time then most of the people here.

I started as a story that while common today, we didn’t think of as common back in the 1950s. Two kids get married, have a baby, and then get divorced: because they were too young to have gotten married in the first place!

As we all know, life has many “Y’s” in the road. Mine has definitely been no different. As I grew up my Dad or the Goodwin family had never been a topic of much discussion. I grew up as Joseph Tad Brown. It took my applying for a passport to find out that my birth certificate was still Goodwin. Several years before 2005, my wife Stacy had asked my uncle Joey about my dad and he had always said nothing but positives about him. After that information, Stacy would occasionally ask me about trying to find him over the years. And thanks to her searching, we did, with just a short letter of inquiry to an address we had absolutely no idea would be the right one. Guess it was!!

Just as easily though I could have gone my entire life never meeting my dad, but then I was really lucky to have gotten the chance to have known him at all and even that was, I guess, as much a miracle as me being able to reconnect. You see, I was told the story of how, ready for a relaxing retirement of leisure and travel, and starting this out on a cruise with very dear family members, dad was knocked off his feet by a heart attack.  The doctors at the time were giving him, days, weeks, maybe even a month or two at most, but over 14 years later he was still ticking and kicking!

Of course though, over the years, all the medications he had to take began to take their toll, and with him in failing health we all began to gather at the end of August. Again the doctors said it was to be only hours or days, and again dad made it another month beyond what the doctors thought he could possibly live! And up to the very last, his heart that was supposed to stop years ago wouldn’t stop without a fight!

While I was there in Missouri a few weeks ago, dad and I had the opportunity to really talk about many things. We talked about how much my life would have been different had I been able to have stayed in contact with the family. We both were wishing we could have changed that, but no one can. You can only go forward not back.

I am very glad to have met him, very glad to have spent the time and had conversations with him, very glad to have been introduced to, what I feel, is a great family. Back in 2005 I instantly had two new brothers, new cousins, and multitudes of relatives, many of which I still haven’t even met yet!

But all in all, I am very proud be part of the Goodwin family and I will truly miss my father, Clifford.

I would like to thank my daughter and dad’s granddaughter Laura and our grandson, and dad’s great grandson, Tyler, for attending on our behalf today.

Tad