Damon's Thoughts Offered at his Dad's Funeral:
"Pride is a funny word but it seems to be the only word that approaches what I feel when I say “I’m Greg Hullinger’s son” but it isn’t quite right. Proud sounds arrogant but I don’t feel arrogant, I feel profoundly humble. The word pride gets used in the context that something bad is about to happen to a person “pride goeth before the fall” or “his pride led to his downfall”. I understand that kind of pride but that’s not what I feel today. I’m hoping that I can help you feel what I feel as I remember my dad.
"Pride is a funny word but it seems to be the only word that approaches what I feel when I say “I’m Greg Hullinger’s son” but it isn’t quite right. Proud sounds arrogant but I don’t feel arrogant, I feel profoundly humble. The word pride gets used in the context that something bad is about to happen to a person “pride goeth before the fall” or “his pride led to his downfall”. I understand that kind of pride but that’s not what I feel today. I’m hoping that I can help you feel what I feel as I remember my dad.
I'm 7 or 8. Just old enough to start caring about sports and what sports were how many points do you get for a touchdown or a field goal. I’d hear my mom tell me about how my dad went to BYU. My dad talked to me about BYU football all the time. I’d hear the game playing on the radio every Saturday. Dad loved the BYU Cougars. 8-year-old Damon took these facts and came up with his own set of facts. Dad was once a quarterback for the BYU Cougars. I told everyone because you see I was very proud of my dad. I told all my friends, their parents, kids at school, anyone that would listen. I think I may have even convinced a few of them but I don’t remember any adults correcting me on this alternate version of history. They understood where my heart was. The truth is dad was on the diving team at BYU. He loved the sport of it. I found his journal last week. I couldn’t put it down till I’d read it all. In his journal he talks about being on the 3rd string diving team and feeling driven to be as good as the first and second team divers someday. I’m as proud now as I was then as an 8-year-old boy. I’m proud that my dad was driven and used that drive to work hard instead of making excuses about why he wasn’t on the first team. My dad didn’t make excuses.
I’m 15, maybe 16 years old. I spent a lot of time with dad on scouting trips at that age. I remember one particular trip we were at Flaming Gorge. We were fishing and rafting the Green River and camping near a set of cliffs at Flaming Gorge reservoir known as Mustang Ridge. The cliffs were perfect for diving off into the reservoir. You could choose how high to climb before jumping. We had started at the bottom which was barely a high dive and worked our way up, jumping off a higher and higher perch until we had reached the pinnacle. We stood there timidly looking down at the water, skinny bodies shivering in the wind as we tried to get the nerve to jump. It was significantly higher than the previous lower jump. We’d inch closer to the edge, then back away after looking over at the water below. This went on for some time. I see my dad hiking towards us. I start to get nervous. I don’t want to disappoint him; I’m going to have to find the courage to jump. As dad reaches us, he doesn’t say a word. His shirt and shoes come off and in one motion he’s over the edge, head first! We looked at each other in disbelief. I mean jaw to the floor, that didn’t just happen disbelief. In my mind that cliff had to be at least 100’ tall. In reality it was more like 40’. As I’m looking around at my buddies talking about what had just happened, that familiar sense of pride welled up in me. I had no doubt in my mind that I was going to jump too and over the edge I went, albeit feet first, with my shoes on. I’m as proud of my dad today as I was then. As a dad myself now I recognize what he wanted to teach. Our actions speak louder than our words. My dad really embodied this idea.
I’m 30 something. For the first time my brother Adam and I are going on a big river trip with my dad. Adam and I would run our own raft, my dad would run his own raft. It was a big deal. We had worked up to this day by learning the ways of the river and how to safely navigate a river for many years leading up to this trip. He took the responsibility of teaching us very seriously. The trip would be a week on the Green River including hells half mile which would be the roughest stretch of class 3 and class 4 rapids we’d floated to date. There’s a story there, but I’ll save that story for another day, or maybe Adam will tell it, it’s a good one. We are four or five days into to the river trip. It’s getting dark, It’s raining, It’s cold. Earlier in the day we decided that we could make a push to another campsite further down the river, the one we were intending to use was already occupied and we didn’t feel like sharing the campsite with another group. As we pushed on Adam and I noticed that dad was falling behind, he wasn’t able to keep up. It was the first time I saw my dad as mortal, vulnerable. He was cold, shivering and exhausted. He pulled alongside us so that Adam could take the oars from him while I rowed our raft alone. We rowed as hard as I’ve ever rowed for the next hour and pulled into our campsite just as it was getting too dark to see. As we put up our tent in the dark I still remember the sense of pride about doing something for him for once. That night as we laid in our sleeping bags, too exhausted to cook dinner, eating beef jerky and cheese, we talked about the hard day behind us. We were equals. We were men. Not father and son, more like brothers. I was overcome with a feeling of gratitude and respect. Humility allowed that moment to happen. Please son, it’s time for you take the oars from me. That’s as far as I can go.
What’s it like to be Greg Hullinger’s son? I’m not sure I have a word for it but it feels like humble-proud.
As we thought about a musical number for today's services, I volunteered my daughter Kandus to play a piece on the piano. She said that she was happy but nervous to do it. Kandus is going to play Anne’s Theme. It's a score from the 4 part series Anne of Green Gables that aired on PBS in the 80’s, adapted from the books by L.M. Montgomery. I think dad would have loved it. I’ll leave you with Anne’s closing thoughts. It seems to summarize my dad’s life nicely.
“I went looking for my ideals outside myself and discovered it’s not what the world holds for you, it’s what you bring to it. The dreams dearest to my heart are right here.”
