I am sorry to see
The chilli plant,
Like my father,
Did not survive winter.

1. Sadness is not weakness. I am stronger than ever. Grief is my right. I do not need to be fixed.
   
   
2. People are kind. Kindness is compromised on a daily basis by confounding factors. Occasionally, all that is swept aside.
   
   
3. Good things come from death. It shouldn't be so, but it is. We examine aspects of our lives and relationships, and find them petty. The walls in which we box ourselves are trivial and irrelevant. We transcend them quickly and easily.
   
   
4. In grief, you live a double life. One functions as normal, the other is trapped inside a single moment. This one is by far the greater, but largely invisible.
   
   
5. People comfort themselves by telling me that I am just like my father. This is not true, but it makes them feel better. It does not help me though.
   
   
6. I come to understand who my father was, and therefore who I am also, and what he gave me.
   
   
7. Every little "never again" will have its turn, and will be grieved.
   
   
8. We are all one family.
   
   

[This was my eulogy, delivered 3 July 2009.]

My father was not a scientist, but he was a scientific man. That was his basis for understanding the world. He gave me many gifts and that was one of them. When I try to understand the world, when I try to understand my life, when I try to understand what we’re all doing here, I start with science.
 
Here’s a fact Dad and I were discussing a couple months back. The human body contains 20 microbial cells for every human cell. If aliens walked among us today, they might think we were ingenious mobile homes the bacteria had built. And, if you want to look at it that way, you would be justified. A microbe lives inside every human cell, providing it with essential energy. Microbes also help us digest food and synthesize vitamins. 100 trillion tiny lives in every one of us. What are they going through right now?

I spent many hours with my father in the intensive care unit, sitting, reading the vital signs monitor, watching those coloured lines, learning what numbers look good, and what numbers induced a flurry of activity from the nurse, knowing that there was no true good or bad. He was already gone. Nevertheless, my father would have been interested, so I took the opportunity to learn what I could.

For example, you can gauge your blood oxygenation by measuring light absorption at two different wavelengths when you shine a laser through your fingertip. My father would have been fascinated by the pulse oximeter: the tiny device sitting on his thumb, but he never saw it.

When I was a child, we made pinhole projections of solar eclipses. He showed me the moons of Jupiter. We talked about time dilation, the relativity of space-time, and the paradox of the clocks. We talked about the Big Bang and why anything exists at all. He didn’t have the answer to that, but science is more about hard questions than easy answers. Wonder is the miracle of the unanswered question. He taught me that.

Dad was a builder. I don’t mean that he built houses, although he did. I mean that he built things. Cars, homes, machinery: anything he decided on. He could recognise problems and imagine solutions. Then he could take those ideas and see them through. He leaves behind a trail of things he created. He taught me that you can do it, if you choose to.

To build things, he would use fibreglass, timber and steel, hammers, drills, angle grinders, and, once or twice, a chainsaw. He didn’t pass those skills on to me. Perhaps he didn’t want me to get my hands dirty. To build things, I use electrons and photons, and they are light and ephemeral, and they course around the world. But they are still solutions to problems, and still places where people live, where they meet, and talk, and learn. And they’re still built the way he showed me: with an idea, and a plan, and persistence, and attention to detail, and elegant simplicity.

Dad showed me how to work. If I was digging out a drain, he would grab the spade off me and make the hole bigger, and with straighter sides. He was not a dilatory man. Why put off until tomorrow what you can do today? Once I was thinking out loud about needing a gate in the fence in a house I lived, so I could get to the firewood more easily. He requested a claw hammer and started stripping back the wood. A few minutes later there was a pile of broken palings and a large hole. Dad taught me how to get things done. “Make a choice and stick to it.” This is something that I am known to say, but he gave it to me.

Every morning I awake and my brain tells me: You are Matthew Walker. You are 37. It’s a cloudy cool morning (or raining). The world will not wait. Get up. Oh: your father is dead. He dies every morning. Kurt Vonnegut’s words: “Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”

It’s like walking through the rooms of a house and opening a door to one of the rooms, and the door swings wide open freely but there’s nothing beyond it, just charcoal blackness. And it’s like we have to learn a new way of walking through the house. And we have to learn not to open that door. We have to learn to do without that room and everything inside of it, because everything in it is gone. We have to learn a new way to live. I think it is remarkable that an entire lifetime of memories, all those skills, that personality, that all of that can be erased in seconds. And I realised that we are all fragile pieces of glass, and every moment is a lucky one.

I like to collect stones from different places I visit and I label them and put them in a cabinet. I have some obsidian, volcanic glass, from the Port Hills, some schist from Arrowtown, near where Mum and Dad lived for a while, stained pink from manganese impurities, orange rhyolite from Akaroa, near another place they lived.

My Dad collected a few stones in his time too but his were based on calcium, not silicon, and he kept them inside his body. He visited hospitals a couple times to get them removed. I was used to that routine: a night or two in hospital, then resumption of normal life. I feel foolish. I think of the last night I saw him, expecting him to be out of hospital the next day. I wish I gave a little more that night.

Dad was a man of actions, not words. He never really gave me any good advice. Instead, he showed me. There was just one time though. Somehow it came up: I was wondering how to make a difference, how you do something important in the world. He told me that you provide for your family. You give them what they need. And I realise now how much his life changed for us. He quit motor racing, started a family and worked at a job he didn’t like for years, for us. Dad was a humble man who despised vanity and arrogance. He would rather just do it than talk about it. Words are too easy. Yet all I have and all any of us have here today are words.

You stand up when called upon, and you do what has to be done, and you give what is needed, and you persist. He was a good man, and it has taken me most of my life to truly appreciate that. He’s not here now, but I’m still learning from him.