The following is a guest blog by Mark K. Shriver, son of Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr.
I never planned to write a book,
much less a book on my relationship with my dad.
But something happened to me during the days
leading up to his funeral, at the funeral itself, and in the days thereafter.
I had heard that old epithet — “a
good man”— in reference to Dad so many times that it passed from a cliché to
an irritant to a haunting refrain. I had
lost count of the people who had applied it to Dad when they’d reached out to
me.
At first, I thought that the cliché
was just an easy out, words for people who didn’t know what else to say.
But then I realized that they were
taking the phrase back. Through their
repetition, if not their realization, they were redeeming words that I thought
had been put out to linguistic pasture.
Some of the more startling
instances came back to me as I knelt in the dark beside Dad’s coffin on the
morning of the funeral. A prominent U.S.
senator who knew Dad well, yet obviously didn’t know him as well as he thought
he had, told me, “I knew your dad had done a lot, but he did much more than I
had known. He was a good, good man.”
Ms. Wilson and Ms. Williams, both
of whom waited in the wake line at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown,
told me that they were waitresses at Reeves Restaurant, Dad’s regular lunch
spot across from his office.
And before that, Ms. Wilson had
waited on him at the Hot Shoppes in Bethesda for 35 years. They wanted to tell me that they had never
met a more polite, thoughtful man in their 40 years of work. “He was such a good man,” they said
simultaneously.
I will never forget the rumble of
the garbage truck outside of our house and seeing Calvin, the trash collector,
standing in our driveway, trying to decide whether to walk up to the front door
and knock. I made it easy for him; I was
on the lawn and went toward him. He took
off his dirty gloves, wiped his palms on his work clothes, and reached out his
hands for mine.
“What a life,” Calvin said. “I read about your dad in the paper and, man,
I had to put the paper down. I had to
take a step back— whoa! He helped so
many people— what a good man!”
I also couldn’t shake my
conversation with Edwin at the wake. He
worked for US Airways and had crossed paths with Dad many times during those years
of travel. Not long ago, he’d seen Dad
struggling and had spent half an hour helping him get through the security line. Edwin waited in that line at the wake, too,
and told me that those thirty minutes were some of the most special ones in his
life.
“I never met anyone in all my years
like your father,” he said. “He was such
a good man.”
Then I thought about my kids and
remembered how, two years prior, Tommy had watched Dad, Alzheimer- stricken and
hobbled, grab his own cake plate after the party for his ninety- third
birthday, take it to the sink, and clean it.
Tommy had looked at me, licked the icing off his last forkful, and
followed Dad to the sink with his plate.
Tommy had observed, at a very young
age, what a good man Dad was, right down to the smallest detail of etiquette.
The great man is recognized for his
achievements. But there are many
so-called great men who are not good – they act differently when the camera
lights are off; they treat the rich and powerful differently than the treat the
“average Joe.”
The good man can be great in the
achievement arena, too, but he is also good at home, on the sidewalk, at the
diner, with his grandkids, at the supermarket, at church— wherever human
interaction requires integrity and compassion.
Dad was good because he was great
in the smaller, unseen corners of life. He
insisted on it in every facet of the daily grind. Indeed, I learned that Dad’s commitment to
goodness was deeply rooted in his relationship with God. He went to Mass every day, and I mean every
day, and it was that daily interaction with God that, I am convinced, gave him
his boundless joy and positive energy.
And it was his faith that propelled him to treat each person and every
interaction as if that person and that moment were gifts from God. He acted so because he really did believe
that everything was a gift from God.
Oh, to have such faith!
I wrote
A Good Man to
better understand the lessons of his life and his final struggle with
Alzheimer’s — lessons about the durability of faith, the endurance of hope, and
the steadfastness of love.
How had he been so faithful? So hopeful?
And so loving? These were the
three guiding principles of his life— faith, hope, and love— and I needed to
get to the source of them.
For my family and friends, for his
admirers, and for me, I wanted to better understand these guiding principles so
we could all try to live the same way, so I could use him as my guide as I
strove to be a better man, to be as good a man as he.
