Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
Today would be my father's birthday; we lost him three years ago come Christmas week.
While no one actually gets to 'enjoy' their own wake, my dad had a preview of his when his own father died. They shared the same first and surnames, with only a middle name to differentiate them, so when my grandfather died, many people who didn't know this assumed it was dad who had passed.
I'll never forget the standing-room-only crowd spilling out into the funeral home's parlor when we arrived at Grandpa's wake. You had to push your way through to the casket to the washroom, to the exit...and it wasn't easy because person after person came to my sisters and me to tell us stories of our father.
Dad was an insurance underwriter by trade, a life insurance salesman. He believed term life insurance was a gift that could make a lifetime of difference for a struggling family and that insurance generally was a smart buy. He never made a killing at it though; that was not his plan.
I heard him chuckle one night to Mama about a sale he'd made following up a sales call with his supervisor, Jim (name changed). Jim was always on Dad's back for not selling more and bigger policies (and fat commission checks for them both), not that Dad was ever listening to him. On this occasion, Jim had determined to show Dad how it was done.
They visited a young couple and had coffee in the kitchen, Dad choosing the seat farthest from the couple, behind the supervisor. Jim began his spiel, directing his talk to the young husband, reminding him of all he would want to give his wife were he not cut down by death...and a big fat life insurance could make certain she would have the security and lifestyle he'd want for her. Unbeknownst to Jim, Dad was shaking his head 'no' to almost every point Jim made. The couple refused to buy right then, promising to think over what Jim had said. When Dad signed them up later that week - for a very much smaller policy that would fit easily into their budget - Jim shook his head and congratulated Dad, saying what a difficult sale that must have been.
It actually was, but not for the reason Jim thought: Dad had actually needed to talk the couple down to that smaller policy after Jim's hard-sell push. Jim, he said, didn't bother to consider their circumstances. It was better to have a small policy you can afford than a big one that cramped you financially and which you'd have to let go later, getting no benefit from your payments. Dad's idea was always to have clients get a small policy till their means allowed them to consider a big-dollar-payoff policy with ease.
In Dad's world, the right thing was not to sell as much as possible but to discover the client's needs and sell them what would serve them without blowing their budget. He got sales awards, year after year, but it was on the strength of hundreds of small-value sales to clients who recognized him as a friend.
And he was. The diversity of the people who came that night to pay respects to Mom - black, white, Asian, Hispanic, poor, well-to-do, old and and surprisingly young - were a testament of Dad's fidelity to his principle that a person's race or wealth were only details like eye color, that we were all the same with no one better than anyone else. There were so many people of races other than ours in the crowd. I remember thinking that we were in the wrong room, as these people were not family but strangers to us.
The evening of Grandpa's wake, we heard story after story of how Dad had been there for his friends when they were struggling. "Don't let the policy lapse; you lose everything that way," he'd say and pay their premiums - and sometimes give them money to tide them over. He took vegetables and fruit as payment, eggs and once a puppy (not that Mama was overjoyed on that one). When he visited their homes to collect premiums, he was invited in as a friend to have coffee and talk things over.
"Appreciate your father," one client told us. "He's pure gold." One man, I recall, wouldn't let go my hand, so intent was he on expressing just how much he admired Dad.
Dad never talked about how he felt, greeting all the people who came to pay him their respects - and got to pay them to the man directly instead of his survivors. I hope he was as awed as we were by the sheer number of his client/friends who remembered him (he'd retired by then) and felt his assumed loss so deeply.
And I hope he knows, now that we are indeed his survivors, that we were watching and listening, taking his words to heart. I hope he knows we remember and miss him, and that we are so proud to be his daughters.
No comments:
Post a Comment
We welcome all comments and thoughts written in the spirit of love.