Father and son relationship - Eulogy

I stand before you today to pay my last respects, and to say my final goodbye, to my dear father.

Those of you who knew my father would probably agree that he was not an easy man to live with or love. In particular, he was not what you would call a good husband, for he could only bring my mother a great deal of unhappiness. He was extremely fussy and nothing that I did would ever please him. He had no patience in music; it was really just a noise to him. He was particularly selective in picking out the right books to read, no lightweight rubbish or anything whingeing. For a long time, I understood and perceived him the way that you do today, but it was not until recently that I came to realise just how significant his life was to me.

He fully lived up to his standards, which were the standards of his generation, a generation unlike my own whose world views was shaped by the hardship and terror of his wartime experience.

Taking Father Home

Drunk Father

View from World Trade Center

Perhaps, it is a generation whose world views that I may never understand.

Unlike the many other wartime heroes, my father refused to talk about anything that happened during the war. Ever since the moment my father came back, he was a changed man. There was something about him that was permanently lost, taken away by the war, of which words cannot describe.

At regular basis, my father was a real falling-down drunk, who would end up having to be hospitalised. Yet he was never, in his worst condition, physically violent and he never swore. I realised today that maybe through drinking, he could truly feel at peace, and perhaps for a while, he could forget about all the terrible things that...