A year ago yesterday my father died of prostate cancer. My relationship with my dad was the most complicated and difficult relationship of my life; some of it was my fault and some of it was his, but the reality was that we barely spoke or saw each other for the last fifteen years of his life up until the final weeks when he was dying in hospital. At his wake and funeral it was very clear that he had aspects of his life I knew nothing about; he had been a basketball coach for years, a side of him I never saw or knew much about. In death it became obvious that we were both bigger than the things we always fought about and I was able to put a lot of hurt aside to write a eulogy for him. I am a writer, something he was often ambivalent about, and I have spent years dealing with my own issues of depression and repressed anger that keep me from writing as often as I’d like to or should. But the night before his funeral I found myself able to put any negative feelings and hurts aside to write about him in a way that I hoped would bring people together rather than drive them apart. The following is the eulogy I wrote for him and one of the few things I wrote in the past year that I actually feel good about. It took his death to prove to myself that I really did love him a lot more than I could admit during all those years I was mad at him. Unlike my younger siblings, as the firstborn & oldest, I found I had a lot of really vivid and positive memories from my childhood of him, things that really helped shape me into who I am today. He was a very spiritual guy and he certainly inspired a sense of spirituality and the eternal in me. In many ways I’ve realized that he will never really be gone from me as there is so much of him I still carry with me. I love you, Dad and I still miss you.
Ronald Joseph Pierpaoli
8/10/47-2/20/08
Fathers loom large over the lives of sons and daughters. Whether present or absent, the role and position of father in any family is that of primacy; in numerology the father is represented by 1. Paternal energy is synonymous with maleness and the life-giving radiance and energy of the sun.
Ron Pierpaoli loomed large as a father. He had two families, two sets of children and he straddled the
