My Funeral Tribute Talk About Jeff

This is the text of the talk I gave at Jeff's funeral. Yes, I really do write all of the lame jokes in to my talk, and I couldn't find a way to edit them out for this post and still keep it real. **Warning: At the end of this post are some pictures of Jeff in his casket. I thought when my cousin was taking them that my might be creepy, but I thought they turned out really sweet. If that creeps you out, maybe don't scroll clear to the bottom of this post (especially if you were there to hear this talk anyway!

I told Jeff if he died there were two things that I was going to do – 1) Wear jeans to his funeral. His response was “Why would I care?” I said “I knew you wouldn’t, but our moms are going to have a coronary.” And 2) I will be the only speaker at your funeral and it will be short and pretty irreverent. He said “The widow never speaks.” I said “After 17 years of marriage are you telling me, for the first time, that I can’t do something?” He said “No, you can if you want, but I’m not sure you really can.” When Jeff and I met he listened only to rock music “KBER”, I helped him mature and love country music. I told him – when I think of the last year we have been through and all I am watching you go through now one country song comes to mind when I think about speaking at your funeral. This Ain’t Nothing. Our lives have felt like they were on pause the last two months and even more so in the last two weeks. I feel like having this opportunity to pay tribute to Jeff, no matter how irreverent it might get, is the first step to getting our life back to normal play speed and rejuvenating the personality of our family that became so bogged down with worry, pain and fear. This is the third time I am speaking at a funeral in a year and a half and the third important man I have lost in that time. Maybe this time I will get it right and we can have a break for a while. The first two men were my grandpas. Writing a tribute to them was so much easier because we had “moments”; little things between us that were the building blocks of our relationship. Figuring out where to start with this tribute has been harder because while Jeff and I had our moments, oh boy did we have our moments, it was more than that. It was our LIVES, and how can I express how amazing that life has been for the past almost 18 years in just a few moments. I remember the day I met Jeff. I was moving in to the apartment above his in college housing and he saw me carrying a box in from my truck. He barely paused as he said “I’d carry that for you, but it isn’t my day to be a gentleman.” And to think, he is the only boy I ever dated! I would tell my girls to run away from that kind of guy, but I would be wrong. My dad passed away a little less than a year before I met Jeff. It was beautiful and healing to watch him interact with my younger siblings. They adored him from day one, especially little 8 year old Beau. Jeff never blew them off and was always playful and fun. I knew he would be a great dad someday. Kids flocked to him everywhere we would go. When I told my mom we were getting married a few months later she became concerned and took me to lunch to have a chat. She asked me to really think hard about this decision and make sure I wasn’t rushing in to marriage with the first guy I dated, just to replace my dad. I thought she was crazy. To my love glazed eyes, my dad and Jeff were nothing alike. Now, almost 18 years later, I know that they were scarily similar in all the most important ways. My dad considered his family his most important possession, so did Jeff. They both expressed this through fun family outings like camping and 4-wheeling. Jeff and I had a bit more means than my parents had when I was younger so we also added in road trips, Disneyland trips and a family cruise. Jeff and I also got to go on some pretty amazing trips as a couple. We loved every trip we ever took to Mexico, and we actually made it to Hawaii, which had been a goal, just three months ago. Jeff “pulled a muscle” just a week before we were to leave on our trip. I say “pulled a muscle” because he always maintained that was where the pain came from but knowing what we knew three weeks later, I think it is very likely that the returning cancer was causing some of his pain. He didn’t want to go because of the pain, and encouraged me to just go without him, with Kim and Warren, as planned, and leave him behind. Sometimes he didn’t realize that his generous and selfless offers would really be the option that would be harder for me to live with. I bought him crutches, rented a wheelchair, and using my “mad, street cred” obtained the “appropriate” medications to keep him as comfortable as possible. I think he actually enjoyed the trip, except for the crazy rooster that crowed 23 hours a day. Another way that my dad and Jeff were very similar is their ability to make friends. I didn’t recognize this trait in Jeff in the beginning. I knew his friends; they were his roommates and had been his friends since high school. What I didn’t know is that this was just one small circle and Jeff had, and would build, many circles of friends. And he had a gift for networking those circles into a mutually beneficial web of friends. Jeff had many people he met as clients or business associates, but I only ever knew they were friends. I found out during the last week that someone he had been friends with for ten years, and I had assumed he met the same way I did, in our ward (church congregation), was actually a Tuff Shed client. Jeff found out he liked to go 4 wheeling and invited him along to Moab. Then later, when that client/friend found out we were looking for a house he got together with another friend (who it turns out was a client) to be sure we looked at one that was a good deal in their neighborhood, where I finally met them, after we bought that house. When this story was told this past week as people stopped by to reminisce and visit Jeff, I thought “How do you go from a guy looking to buy a garage to a neighbor and friend that is cared enough about to be at the top of someone’s list when they shared they have terminal cancer. This was Jeff’s gift. He had some “friends”, but those were just people he was getting to know well enough they could be “family”. One of the hardest things I had to do to plan this funeral was choose people to help with the services today. He wanted these services to be fun and SHORT which forced me to “pick” just a few to participate. But those were the hardest decisions to make because you were ALL his favorite. That is why I asked to have pencils and paper laid out today, so you could share what we missed by not getting to hear your tribute story; because if I even chose what I would have considered Jeff’s best friends, we would have had to plan to be here for 12 hours. I could do that around a campfire, but I can’t do it in a dress. I feel like I’m getting this off to a bad start on the keeping it short part, so I will just talk about one more aspect of Jeff’s personality; his excessive, obsessive need to be an entrepreneur. This disorder really took off the last 10 years or so, but had I known what to look for I should have spotted it from the beginning. When we first met, Jeff was unemployed and worked for a temp agency (again, not something I would advise my girls to look for in a man. I better start thinking about how to teach them to look beyond some seemingly scary aspects to find what lies beneath.) He did all kinds of jobs for the temp agency, but my favorite was garbage man. We were still dating at the time and he got home from work the same time I did. So he came over to me in the parking lot to give me a hug and there was unidentified goo on his shirt. I dodged away and told him I would see him after he showered, TWICE!! What I missed, thinking he was just a temp, was that he and his friends “the Chrises” had a carpet cleaning business. They had made up business cards and they had equipment from Chris Delahunty’s dad’s floor covering store. I don’t know how much work they actually did with that, but it should have been my first clue that he was destined to be a business owner. After we got married (and football season ended) he got a “real” job at Anderson Lumber. It soon became clear to me that the “job” portion of that was just a tool he used to get to where he wanted to be, a business owner. He would hang out around the lumber section where the “elderly” gentlemen would come in with a plan of what they were going to build or more likely something their old naggy wife wanted done. So Jeff would start walking them through how to best accomplish what they wanted to do. He would help them work up a materials list, he would talk about the tools they would need, and just when the old geezers eyes would start to glaze over as he wondered what he had gotten himself in to, Jeff would casually say “or you know, a friend and I build sheds, decks, fences, gazebos, all kinds of stuff. We could help you out with this.” Jeff had some construction experience at the time, but probably not enough and Chris could probably still show you where the fence with the whammy in it is. After we moved to Salt Lake the side job business owner lay pretty dormant for a while. We started school at the U and he started working “part time” at Tuff Shed. I think he may have worked less than 40 hours the first two weeks. He was driven to excel! His salesman spirit was revitalized and awakened there and he loved a challenge. If someone wanted to order something besides the standard shed he would get so excited about figuring it out. He knew he couldn’t be the owner there so he became the best salesman. We were going to Denver every year to collect his top salesman of the year award. Life was good! We had started our family and I was a stay at home mom. We had recently purchased our home in South Jordan when he said to me one night, “So, this guy from another shed company approached me at the home show and we went to lunch and he wants me to buy in to his company. It is smaller than Tuff Shed and my income would for sure go down, but he has a solid product and I really think it could grow.” After a little discussion and pros and cons listing, and me figuring out that if I was opposed to this it wouldn’t be long before he went out on his own and started from scratch anyway – because the business owner fever had struck again I said “Let’s just do it.” So we scraped together the buy in money and he asked me to take it in. I went there full of faked confidence and check in hand. I walked in and asked for Mike. When I saw him I thought “What has Jeff done?! That is the scariest guy I have ever met!” Mike asked me to sit and chat a minute and he talked about the business and how hard they worked and what they had been willing to sacrifice to get it where it was. He told me how excited he was for Jeff to be a part of it and all they would accomplish together. Mike is still the scariest guy I know, but he was so right. They accomplished so much together, and ventured out in other industries. And Jeff ventured in even more. It got to the point one year, as I was getting the paperwork together to have our taxes done I went to the state business entity website and searched his name just to find all the businesses he had become a part of. I think Jeff got an adrenaline high from starting and managing businesses and seeing what he could create. I know Jeff was an adrenaline junkie! His many riding trips and the stories I would hear later attest to that. His trips started out as “guy” trips. Then they started some daddy daughter ones. Then he started taking all the kids. What I was doing while this was happening remains a mystery. But I do remember when he finally got me to go with them. I was shocked and horrified to see what had been going on all those years. The hills of Moab look like a death trap to this mom. But I am so grateful he did it, and the kids were able to experience that with him. He told me in the last few weeks that he regretted not doing more family things. He felt like he had wasted the last year “waiting to get better.” But we packed more into our short time together than most people get to do with their families in a lifetime. And just this last year we took the girls to Washington DC with his parents. We went to Hawaii, and as I mentioned earlier we went to Vegas as a family less than two weeks ago. I can’t say I feel we wasted any time. I will admit that the trip to Vegas was pretty rough on me. I was quite sleep deprived from stress and we got started on the drive late both directions and it is a long drive. On the drive home I told him that he could sleep or whatever, but I needed something to keep me awake and it had to be my cheesy church music that I had never listened to with him before (I was pushing it with country). I knew the CD well and had my favorite songs on the CD but this time a different song stood out to me and has kept coming back to mind over the last two weeks. So I am going to share the chorus with you. And I wonder How could he know the heartache I feel When he lived a perfect life From Gethsemane to Calvary Was it really for me that He died Then the Spirit whispers These words ringing true From the garden to the cross He walked a mile in my shoes. It is comforting to know that my Savior already walked this path FOR me and he is willing to do it again WITH us. I know that Jeff knew, in his Spirit that his time here was short. He became very reflective the last few weeks. He told everyone who stopped by or called on the phone, or any other contact he had to use him as a wake up call. Get your priorities where they belong. Nothing in life matters but faith and family. He told everyone he didn’t regret not spending more time at work. He had some regrets about not expressing his faith more openly. He had a lot of sadness about leaving his family behind, but he took lots of opportunities to tell us how much he loved us and to remind us that we are an eternal family and our family IS forever! I think often of the theme I learned in Young Women “I am a daughter of a Heavenly Father who loves me”. I know He loves every one of us. I know he has a plan for each of us. I know that plan is perfect even if we don’t understand it now. And I know that the kids and I (and the rest of our family and friends) are going to be okay because His Son, Jesus Christ, walked a mile in our shoes. And when we feel like the burden is too much to bear, He knows, and he will be there for us. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

These are the balloons that we wrote messages off and let go of after the graveside service.

**(This is also your last warning if you don't want to see casket pictures)

The mortuary provided "twin" bears for each of the kids. They got to put one in with Jeff and keep the twin for themselves. You can't see it in the picture, but I sent him with Skittles (taste the rainbow, sweetie!)

A dear friend, Glen, had me tuck a silver dollar in his pocket that he brought for Jeff. During that last week Jeff had told everyone that he had signed everything he owned over to me so he was broke (I promised him a minimum wage job if he would just beat the cancer), but his friend didn't want him to leave without anything. It was a 1904 silver dollar, the same birth year as both of Glen's grandpas. He also gave me a 1972 (Jeff's birth year) silver dollar for each of our kids.

Courtney didn't want to be in the picture.