Thank you, father Stefan, for your heartfelt words, which I know have brought comfort to all of us.

At my father’s funeral service six years ago, my brother read an essay he wrote entitled “One Man’s Journey To Love.”  It was beautifully written, thoughtful, maybe a little too sentimental…in other words, very Steve.  A few wondered if the story of a man’s emotional awakening was less about dad than about himself.

I think the truth is that his speech reflected what my brother wanted to be true for both of them.  It was also typical of Steve with those he cared for to be generous and given to big gestures while perhaps exerting a little wishful thinking over someone else’s reality.

As for the influence on his own reality, my father was the biggest one.  I remember long evenings they spent talking and drinking coffee at the Corner Restaurant.  I never saw either of them bond with anyone else in quite that manner. Of all the kids, Steve was the dutiful son – a straight A student and National Merit Finalist in high school, then graduating at the top of his class at Harvard Business School.  In between, he spent a year in Japan and mastered the difficult written and spoken language, the first step to being the world traveler he would turn into.  He possessed a brilliant, focused mind and competitive instinct – good luck beating him at any kind of game – and that served him well when he entered the business world.  He quickly moved up the corporate ladder, amassed a fortune, lost it, and then shrugged and moved on.  He knew that he would always be able to succeed in the world of business and money.  It came easy to him.

But there was more to the man.  As a little kid I used to fall asleep to the melancholy, wordless strains of my brother’s piano playing.  Steve’s romantic compositions were a window to his soul. Our father, his mentor, once confided that he thought emotions were dangerous.  And on a strictly logical level, that is true…but Steve had already mastered the world of logic, and when he played the piano, he felt the stirrings of a deeper potential.  He wanted to find his heart.  He knew for that, he had to reach outward and away from his immediate family.  He could have remained in the comfortable realm of the mind.  He chose what was for him the harder path.

However, Steve also had a strong sense of order.  He believed in responsibility, in careful planning and in thinking through every possibility before he acted.  It made him a unique and admirable person – and, sometimes, a baffling and distant one. Indeed, Steve had high expectations of himself and high hopes for the people that he encountered, hopes that were often dashed. People are bundles of emotions and chemistry that pull us in many directions all at once, and life is a chaotic place.  Viewed through the prism of his own discipline, this was a hard idea for Steve to get a handle on...at first.

We all know the arc of Steve’s personal and family life.  Possessed with a traditional romantic spirit, he was someone who believed in both passion and commitment. It was his strongest desire to be at the center of a family and a home of his own. As Steve’s family changed and evolved, he learned that a home is not something that is created by a vow or a plan, but is something that slowly develops from imperfection, as each person bumps against the other, expressing their own needs and forcing us to confront in ourselves what one songwriter called the “deep, dark truthful mirror.”  

Indeed, my brother could be exasperating at times.  He was brilliant, articulate and the beliefs he held, he held strongly, and an argument with him could last a long, long time. But consider that it is only people with the greatest potential that exasperate us this way.  The others, we walk away from.  We all knew where Steve wanted to go and what he could be.  We wanted to help him get there.  When we quarreled, it was out of love for the man.  And even with the most heated disagreements or stubbornly held convictions, he always sought understanding and resolution.  That’s part of what made Steve so extraordinary; that desire to learn, to understand, and to fashion an agreement. Steve often said that reasonable people in full possession of the facts would always reach the same conclusion.  Whether that is true or not, the world would be better served by this kind of faith in ourselves.  Our better selves.

So you should know that I do not regret a single word Steve and I ever exchanged, good or bad.  Nor should any of you.  I know that as much as Steve was a man who sought resolution and harmony, it was the conflicts with those he loved that brought about some of the greatest lessons he ever learned. He began to understand the true nature of human weakness and in so doing, the true nature of human strength, and finally, of love.  He may have learned slowly at times, but he doggedly kept trying to understand where so many others give up and become bitter.  And in turn, we learned something, didn’t we?  Have we ever met a man so brilliant, so gifted, so idealistic, and in trying this hard to open his hidden heart to us, so brave?

My last conversations with Steve were focused around how to live our lives more fully. At one point I wished aloud that I could go away for a week and meditate.  I was surprised when Steve urged me strongly to act on this idle thought.  This was not the driven workaholic or the preoccupied man of the house I had once known.  This was someone who was telling me to live for the now, who had come to terms with the disappointments of his life, to let go of ambitions that kept him from real happiness, and to appreciate what he had.  He doted on his youngest daughter, encouraging her in her musical aspirations just as he had once done for me.  He had renewed his bonds with his wife.  In his last weeks he sought spiritual advice and was enthusiastic about joining her church and reconnecting to Christianity.  I know that he sought to re-establish ties with various members of his extended family in the last weeks of his life, without any expectations of them.  He just wanted to drop by and say hi.  And he did.

We can wonder why my brother was taken away so soon and so suddenly.  We can mourn the impact of his passing on our lives.  We can ask why God would act in such a manner.  I would not presume to know the mind of God…but perhaps last Monday, with thoughts of family, home and contentment foremost in his mind, and with the help of every person sitting here in this room, “One Man’s Journey to Love” was finally completed.

Thank you all for coming and God bless you.

Funeral memoriam by Adam Marsland