An Ordinary Man, an Extraordinary Dad and Friend

I’ve written more than a few obituaries in my time. It is the first thing they teach you in journalism school, and most every reporter is asked to write them now and again. Most newspapers keep ongoing obit files on certain outstanding citizens, but if such a thing is not available, there will be press clippings, a list of family, friends and colleagues who might have a few good words to say.

You call them and hope they’ve learned of the death already. But if they haven’t, you murmur condolences and let them express their grief through laudatory words, which you write down. You read all the old stories, or books if the person is famous enough, and crib like mad. You write fast because there is usually a deadline, but you try to do it with grace. You hope it does honor to the person who has died, something that the family will be able to cut out and send to friends or put in a book. It isn’t the most difficult journalistic task around. It’s just something that you do now and again.

I wrote my father’s obituary last week, and it was not like that at all. There was no clip file, no phone list, no deadline, no emotional distance. There was me sitting at my parents’ kitchen table in front of my father’s manual typewriter trying again and again to write something suitable for the Las Cruces Sun-News in New Mexico, something we would have to pay to have printed in the obituary column. The typewriter keys kept sticking, and there was no delete key, and I kept misspelling everything--including my mother’s name--and writing sentences that sounded like they had been composed by a funeral director. That I was doing this seemed impossible, as impossible as the memory of that broad chest upon which I had leaned my head so many times suddenly gone completely still.

To a journalist, the information was skimpy. James Daniel McNamara Jr. was 69. He was born in Chicago. He served in the Army, but in between the wars in Korea and Vietnam (he always referred to himself as a “Cold Warrior”). For 30 years, he was a social studies teacher and a debating coach. He was named Outstanding Teacher in Baltimore County one year, the date of which none of us can remember. He never published. He married my mother 40 years ago and had two children.

It was not a long obituary. My father was not a senator or a CEO, not an author or a movie star. He didn’t help found anything except our family, didn’t invent anything except, to a certain extent, my brother and me. He was not rich, so his continual and generous donations to various charities did not rate him a philanthropist. Neither was he particularly ambitious, so his incredible breadth of knowledge--he was often the first person I called when I started a story about just anything--gained him no scholarly glory, no seat on a talk show.

In the end, the only thing I wrote that meant anything at all was: “He was a loving husband and father and will be greatly missed by his survivors.” Between those words, which would never make it into a big obituary, was the story of a quiet, gentle man who loved his family with the peaceful, unwavering devotion that certain Irish, and Irish American, men have.

He rarely raised his voice, and never his hand, in anger to anyone. He always said, “I love you” at the end of a phone conversation with one of his children. He was never without a book; when I was young, the sound of goodnight was the thump of a book closing, the clatter of his glasses on the nightstand and the click of the light going off. My favorite Christmas present every year was the inevitable box of paperbacks from Dad.

After he retired, he and my Mom took a trip to Ireland and fell in love; year after year they went back, and often my brother and I went with them. Some years we begged to go somewhere else--Italy, Spain, anywhere--but Dad loved the Irish so, and we could not refuse him. We were to go this June to celebrate his 70th birthday. That loss is somehow the hardest thing for me to think about.

He taught his children to respect everyone, no matter their race or religion or cultural background, to help the poor and pray extra hard for the Republicans in the hopes that they would change their ways. He was a devout Catholic who, though pained by many of the church’s conservative attitudes, never considered abandoning his faith. The Catholic Church was his family; he believed it would only change if its members changed it.

No one loved music more than my father. He had a beautiful tenor voice but he could not dance, could never learn, not even to please my mother. He loved jazz and swing, and I think he had more Benny Goodman CDs than any person not related to the man by blood. Although he believed Artie Shaw had the greater natural talent, my father never forgave him for his decision to stop performing. Goodman was the better musician, my father said, because he remained committed to his craft. My father sang continually to his children and then his grandchildren. When he was in Ireland, he would sing to the cows.

My father was the best teacher I have ever met. Whenever we toured the battlefields of Gettysburg, which was near our home, people would overhear my father explaining the events to us and, inevitably, a crowd would gather and follow our family around while my mother worried about whether we had enough egg salad to feed everyone. I learned about the Chinese Cultural Revolution over dinner, the impact of the ancient Greeks on modern society while raking leaves, and the significance of the closing of the American West on visits to my grandparents’ house.

When my brother and I were in college we often turned these conversations into conflicts, challenging his analyses, his white-male prejudice, his grasp of the facts. My Dad was unfazed. If we couldn’t back up our arguments, he dismissed us; if we could, he listened and nodded, respectful of the opinion even if he disagreed. He embraced our new teachers--when I read Mary Daly, he read Mary Daly. All the way through.

When my father knew he was dying, his only concern was for my mother. “Be of good cheer,” he told me after informing me that he was not going to seek treatment for his very advanced liver cancer. “We are all Christians here. I am not afraid, and I want no hanging of crepe.” He didn’t want a viewing or a funeral. “Just bury me in the backyard and have a lot of Masses said,” he would say. About 10 years ago, he changed his mind a bit; he wanted his ashes to be scattered off Downpatrick Head in Ireland. With my mother’s, when the time comes.

I know my Dad is in heaven, because if he isn’t, then there is no heaven. I can imagine whom he asked to visit with first: his mother, then Dorothy Day and W.B. Yeats, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, Benny Goodman, Frank O’Connor, St. Theresa and St. Francis, Michael Collins, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald and St. Patrick.

James Daniel McNamara Jr. was 69. He strove to be good in a world where maybe that doesn’t count as much as it should. He was not famous or powerful, his achievements were not of public record or of public note. He was not perfect, but he was an exemplary man. He left behind no unfinished business. His family and friends knew they were loved, and he knew he was loved in return. His wife was provided for. His children were happy. He had no quarrel with his God.

I have always thought my father extraordinary, but he never thought himself so, and I know that he is not unique. When you lose a parent, I have discovered, you join a secret society of those who have too. And most of those deaths never make the front page. So this is an obituary for all those who die without pomp and press clippings. For the beloved parents and spouses and children who were not famous or infamous, who didn’t die in national tragedies, who didn’t win prizes or become household names. Like my father, they were splendid in the quiet grace of day to day. It is not the stuff of great obituaries, but it is the stuff of great lives.