A Year Late Eulogy

Remembering my father

Intro

I have not posted here as often as I ought, and for that I am sorry, especially to those who have paid me to post here. One reason I have posted less is that my father used to read my posts and send me edits and comments each time I sent out a new post. My father passed away last year, and it has been strange to post something here and not receive a text from him. I don’t think I can continue this project without acknowledging both his passing and his influence on who I am as a person and a writer, and so I offer this, an edited version of the eulogy I delivered at his funeral last year.

A Eulogy: 6/21/2025

I am here today to deliver a short message called a “eulogy” for or about my father. “Eulogy” literally means “a good word” (“eu” and “logos). It’s not too different from the word from which we get our word “evangelism” from; euangellion [evangellion] is the good news, and similarly eulogy is a good word.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know how to eulogize someone who hurt you deeply, because to “speak ill of the dead” is the opposite of eulogizing. But I think to speak well of my dad requires speaking of his successes despite or perhaps alongside his flaws, his achievements alongside his failings. The program you have in front of you has my dad’s obituary, so I won’t repeat what you have in front of you. Instead, if I can manage, I want to speak a bit more personally.

As many of you know, my father spent many years battling substance abuse issues. Those issues took precious years away from his time as a husband, a father, a brother, an uncle, and a grandfather. They ravaged his body and his relationships, and for many of us made for some quite difficult memories that do not need to be recounted here.

But as my dad, in various ways, surmounted and overcame parts of his destructive behaviors and repaired some of the relationships he had lost, or made new ones, one thing he would say to me often was to remember the good times. And there were good times, many of them. My father took me fishing and to baseball games, and took me on my first camping trips. He taught me to wrestle and introduced me to weight lifting, he gave my first pocketknife and encouraged me to pursue martial arts (only with the late LC Collins of Blountville Tennessee’s East Tennessee Taekwondo and Karate, he told me. No one else was good enough).

My father, with whom I had such a complicated relationship, taught me to play chess over late night bowls of chocolate ice cream, and I’m not sure I ever beat him. He told me and my sister elaborate, creative bedtime stories, and took us to church faithfully every Sunday in our early years. He and my mother taught us to “read and pray” daily, to spend time in the word of God, to reflect on our faith, and the reason for the hope that is within us. I don’t necessarily intend to wax into the apologetic, but sometimes people will say “well, you are just a Christian because you were raised that way,” and honestly, sometimes I say, “yes, and for that, I am grateful.” Despite his failings, he raised us in that faith and we remain in it and it is to his credit.

My father was a police officer with the Kingsport Tennessee Police Department for 19 years. If you or a loved one have served in the military or as a first responder, you know that the duty to protect and serve exacts a toll on you. The things my father saw and did during his time protecting his community stuck with him, plagued him, and while no single cause can explain why some people develop addictions, and nothing can necessarily excuse the things that result, I have no doubt that those memories played a role in his struggles. My father was the first responder in a particularly painful crash on Interstate 81 in Tennessee, staying with a gas tanker driver whose truck caught fire, comforting him and recording his last words for his own family as he succumbed to his wounds. It is difficult to fault someone for dealing badly with a bad hand they’ve been dealt, and it is hard to blame someone for feeling as anyone reasonable would feel when they’ve been through something horrible.

Through all this, as anyone who spoke to my dad for more than five minutes could tell you, he never lost those parts of his character that made him such an interesting and relatable and approachable person. In the past weeks as my dad was in the hospital, I’ve talked to people who knew him all the way back to high school until just recently, and without fail they always mention how friendly he is, how charming, how affable, how smart and talented. In short, Robert Bunn was always able to make friends wherever he went in any circumstance. That is a skill that can be used for good or for ill, but I know that those who have loved and ministered to him recently have seen it used for much good in his community.

St. Paul writes in his first epistle to the Corinthians that if Christ is not raised, then we are of all people most to be pitied. That is, if Jesus Christ did not actually, bodily rise from the dead, as our Christian creed proclaims, then we believers in the resurrection and the life everlasting are to be pitied. You should feel bad for those of us who believe in such silly delusions, Paul suggests. But because Christ was and is raised, and we believe that he will return and draw to him the living and the dead, we have hope, and we do not mourn as those who have no hope. The physical, mental, and moral failings my father possessed, and that many of us sitting here today possess, are lamentable, they are condemnable, they are artifacts of the fall and our sin. But we, me, you, and my father, believed and believe that these things will be restored and glorified, and so we look, hope, and pray for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

I don’t wish to belabor the bad, but I think it’s important to reiterate: my dad made mistakes, which hurt those close to him. Nevertheless, and despite those mistakes, he trusted in Christ as his savior. He sought forgiveness from those he had wronged, he sought Christ’s love in his church, and to the extent he could, he sought to give back to the community that had helped him get to where he was in his later years. He was not perfect, and he like all of us did not complete his journey to christlikeness in this lifetime, but he taught me to believe what I believe is true of him and for all who believe: that through his faith in Christ, he will be greeted by his savior in the resurrection with these words: well done, my good and faithful servant.