Sep 10, JDN 2458007

Douglas Patrick Julius

April 15, 1954 to August 31, 2017

My father died suddenly and unexpectedly from a ruptured intracranial aneurysm. I received a call that he was in the hospital Wednesday morning at 11:30 AM PDT, took the first flight to Michigan I could find, and arrived around 10:30 PM EDT. By the time I got there, my father was already unconscious and under intensive care. I stayed up all night in the hospital. My father never regained consciousness. He was declared dead at 8:30 AM on Thursday morning.

In lieu of a proper blog post this week, I decided to post the eulogy I gave at my father’s funeral this past Sunday. It follows below.

What is a soul? What is it made of? Most people imagine a soul as something immaterial, something somehow “beyond” this physical world. But at its core, a soul is simply what makes us who we are. Today we have cognitive science, and now understand the human soul better than it was understood by all the billions of people in all the thousands of years of human civilization before us. Thanks to cognitive science, we now know what the soul is made of: It is made of information.

My father wasn’t made of some mysterious substance “beyond” our physical world, but nor was hejust the molecules of his body you see here. My father was made of hopes and dreams, laughter and tears, words and ideas. He was made of James Joyce novels and Catullus poems, Spider-Man comics and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, road trips across America, gazes over the Grand Canyon, spelunking in Carlsbad Caverns, walks on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, warm hugs, gentle smiles, sophisticated puns, obsessive organizing, and reading literally thousands of books, on everything from Celtic literature to quantum physics. (I think he knew the former a lot better than the latter, while for me, it is the reverse.)

And coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.

Most of what my father was is now gone, and I don’t think we should try to deny that. I don’t think it’s healthy—or even effective—to tell ourselves that he isn’t really gone or that he’s in some better place. Deep down we all know the loss we feel. We know the regrets we have of all the things we thought we’d get to do together, but now we know we never will. There are three that are especially painful for me: My father will never get to see my PhD diploma, never know me as “Doctor Patrick Neal Russell Julius.” My father will never get to see my wedding. And above all, my father will never get to meet his grandchildren. If I had known, I could have tried to make these things happen sooner, so that my father would get to share them with me. I thought that I had 20 years left to do all these things with my father beside me—but the reality turned out differently. And one of the best definitions of reality is this: Reality, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. We grieve this loss for a reason. It hurts so much to lose my father because we know how much joy he once brought to our lives, and how much he would have if he’d been allowed to go on living. A friend of mine offered me this aphorism: Grief is the price we pay for love.

But my father is not completely gone, either. Our souls are made of information too, and there are little fragments of my father’s soul in every one of us. Every memory we have of him, every time he touched our lives, a fragment of him was downloaded into each of us, and as long as we remember him, he will not be entirely gone.

There are a few memories in particular I’d like to share with you all know—back them up in the cloud if you will—so that the essence of who my father was will live on awhile longer. Human long-term memory is stored in the form of narrative, so I thought it best if I told a few stories.

The first story is about gentleness. We were driving through New Mexico. I had moved recently to Long Beach to study for my master’s degree at CSU; after coming back to Ann Arbor for a visit, Dad had driven with me in my little Smart car all the way across the country. We planned our route to pass the Very Large Array, a gigantic assembly of radio telescopes probably best known for being featured in the film Contact, one of my favorites, based on a Carl Sagan novel I love even more. I had wanted to see it for a long time, so Dad added a few hours to our trip so we could go past it.

When we arrived at the array, we could hardly find any people around. Instead what we found were bugs—grasshoppers I think, and millions of them. Everywhere. The ground was literally covered in them; there wasn’t even any room to walk. Most people would probably have just gone ahead and walked right on top of them, crushing them as they went—but not my father. His gentleness extended even to the lowliest of creatures, and he wanted to make sure we didn’t harm any of the bugs. So he found a way for us to creep, slowly, across the desert, shooing away the bugs at each step, so that they would give us room to pass. We didn’t step on a single grasshopper that day, and I finally got the chance to touch one of the radio telescopes.

The second story is about generosity. We had just bought a baby grand piano, and my mother was learning to play it. For her birthday she had asked for a metronome. So, my father and I went out shopping to find a nice metronome. We found one that seemed perfect, but then the store offered us one that was twice the price, and as far as I can tell, not any better whatsoever. Dad asked me, “Isn’t your mother worth it?” Already a budding economist, I had to explain, “Of course, but that’s not the question. The question is, is the metronome worth it? Save the money and we’ll buy her something else too.” But that’s how Dad was: When buying things for himself, he was frugal, even miserly; several times I saw him find rare books—first editions of Joyce, folio editions of Shakespeare—that he had wanted for decades to get, then pass them up to save $100 or maybe $200. But when buying for other people, money was no object; he’d spend that same $200 buying me another video game system without a second thought. He was generous to a fault; he’d never use his credit cards all year, then max them out every Christmas. As I got older, I actually started scaling back my Christmas lists on purpose, for fear he might go broke buying me everything I had asked for. Sometimes I think I was still a little too greedy, and should have scaled them back even more. I never was able to talk him out of buying me that folding bicycle that now sits in a corner of my apartment in Irvine—at least I talked him down from the model that cost twice as much.

The third and final story is about curiosity. Dad actually taught my high school English AP class. I was originally assigned to a different class, but in that one I was completely miserable. The very first day of class was a demonstration where he asked us all to raise our hands if we expected an A. Since this was an AP class and we were all top-achieving students, most of us did. Then the teacher asked us rhetorically: “How realistic is that?” as though there were some inherent law of the universe making such an outcome impossible. I think he saw grading as a ranking, or even a race; the notion that we could all earn mastery in the subject struck him like the notion that everyone in the Indy 500 could win first place. The next day was a quiz to see how much we remembered of the summer reading. No review, no discussion, no introduction between the students and the teacher—just the quiz. It became clear that this teacher had no interest in educating us; his goal was to evaluate us. After about a week of this I asked to be transferred to a different class. They said all they had was my dad’s class, which seemed awkward to all involved, but I decided to go with that anyway.

I ended up very glad that I had. Dad’s approach to teaching was completely different: He actually wanted us to learn. He didn’t even call them “quizzes”; they were FLAIs, spelled “F-L-A-I” which stands for “Friendly Little Assessment Instrument”. The students who were used to grade-grubbing for an extra few points found his grading system aggravating, because he refused to give a precise point tally for everything (and if you asked for one, he’d make up some nonsensical number on the spot, like “52 million” or “pi”). But the rest of us found it a breath of fresh air. We could stop worrying about how many points this quiz was worth, stop cramming for the next multiple-choice scantron exam—and actually focus our efforts on reading and learning and appreciating literature. My dad didn’t use a lot of fancy gadgets or sophisticated educational techniques; a lot of the time he was just talking and writing on a chalkboard. But his unbounded intellectual curiosity was infectious. If a student showed interest in something, he’d just start talking about that for awhile, even if it didn’t seem relevant; at first students thought this meant they could waste class time by pulling him off on a tangent. But that was never really what happened; he always managed to teach us something unexpected, and usually managed to tie it back to whatever we were studying in class. Sometimes we managed to teach him something too; usually that would be something about physics from me or something about biology from Esther Alfred or Casey Boucher. My favorite class project of all time was for my dad’s class: After reading both Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, I asked if I could write my paper about Slaughterhouse-Five in the style of Pale Fire, meaning as a series of endnotes that bear some passing relevance to the text in question, but are over-interpreted to an absurd degree to the point where they end up telling a completely different story. Most teachers would probably have balked at the idea, but Dad thought it was fabulous. I don’t think he would have thought any differently if I hadn’t been his son; he simply enjoyed nurturing his student’s creativity in that way. I probably didn’t read as many books in that class as I would have in the other English AP class; but my dad’s class fanned the flames of a love of literature that the other class would have done everything it could to extinguish.

That’s about all I have. Thank you for listening, and taking the time to be here today. The world lost a very good man this week, and I know he will be sorely missed by all of us. No words can fully capture our sorrow, but there are a few in particular I think my father would have appreciated, said always on such occasions by one of his favorite authors:
So it goes.