A Eulogy for Robert Louis Hasty
A Eulogy for Robert Louis Hasty
My husband wrote the most beautiful eulogy for his dad who died on Nov. 15. I’d love to share it with you below. I first shared this on Instagram and received an outpouring of love in response. One comment in particular lingers with me. It said, “To all the parents that think your children don’t notice what you’re doing and how you’re living your life - read this and try not to cry.”
A Eulogy for Robert Louis Hasty
My dad was not one to brag - so I’m going to do it for him.
He could fix anything with enough time, and a fresh supply of plastic welder. His epoxy repair work was exceptional, with an unmatched flair of creativity and ingenuity. From broken car parts to toys for the three of us - examples of his artistry are on exhibit throughout our family home, little reminders of his resourcefulness and care.
His creativity, resourcefulness, and ingenuity sprung from a sharp intellect. He was a keen chess player, and often caught me off guard with the depth of his vocabulary. He had a mind for patterns and numbers. As children, we liked to try to stump him by coming up with the longest, most complex math problems our kid brains could imagine. We’d ask our dad to solve them and check the answer with a calculator, reacting with disbelief when he answered correctly every time. It’s one of many great memories we made as children at home.
My parents have owned our family home for 37 years, and for each of those years, my dad cut grass. Lots of grass. My brother Evan and I did a bit of back-of-the-envelope math, and we estimate that over those 37 years, my dad walked nearly one thousand miles pushing a lawnmower, which was probably partially held together with plastic welder. As a child, I would follow him around the yard pushing my toy lawn mower, wanting to take part in what I found to be a joyous chore with my father. Every time I catch the scent of freshly cut grass I think of him.
Pushing a mower wasn’t a challenge for him at all, though. In his prime, my father was a gifted athlete. Never the biggest or strongest, he had incredible dexterity and coordination, combined with speed, and a strategic, competitive drive. In his younger years he played baseball and basketball, but his true athletic obsession was tennis. Singles tennis suited him. To play competitively, coordination and dexterity are required. Winning, though, requires physical endurance and strategy. It’s effectively an on-court chess match at which my dad excelled.
He also loved optimizing his tennis rackets to get a competitive advantage. My dad used a basic, inexpensive, but highly effective racket stringer. He endlessly experimented with types of strings, tensions, racket weighting, and length. I can still see him standing at the kitchen counter on a Sunday afternoon, carefully weaving strings through a racket, while listening to the Cardinals on the radio. When I learned to play tennis, he taught me more than the fundamentals - he used tennis as a way to teach how to work hard, how to learn, how to think, and how to conduct yourself when experiencing challenging situations. When I pull the tab from a can of new tennis balls and hear the hiss of compressed air, my mind still expects to hear his voice giving points of advice before we take to the court. We all cherish memories of playing tennis on the weekends as a family in Washington Park.
Six days out of the week, you could find my dad processing mail for the US Postal Service where he worked for nearly forty years. His first job at the Postal Service was operating a letter sorting machine. This required him to memorize mail delivery routes for the entire state of Missouri, and when presented with a parcel, key the correct route in a fraction of a second. One of my favorite memories with him was when I joined him at work as part of a ‘take your kid to work’ day, getting to experience the place where my dad spent countless hours. The facility had a distinct smell - a combination of fresh paper and print. I can remember walking through the double doors, and being impressed by seemingly endless enclaves of complex machinery.
He would leave for work in the afternoon, and come home late at night. Even when he got home late, he would often stay up, applying himself to support our family. Evan once had a school project that involved building a model of the solar system. Right after it was completed, and as it was being loaded into a car before my dad left for work, it was somehow broken. My dad simply told Evan not to worry about it. When he got home from work late that night, he stayed up, probably got out the plastic welder, and repaired the model so it would be ready by the morning.
He worked diligently and tirelessly to provide for our family, often taking overtime in order to provide resources which enabled what was an idyllic childhood. The scope of the sacrifices my father and mother made to provide our childhood becomes increasingly apparent as the years pass, and as Elise, Evan, and I have become parents.
My father was a consistent pillar of stability in our lives. A man of integrity and dedication. A man of his word. He demonstrated those virtues to us on a daily basis, reinforcing the importance of always trying to ‘do the right thing.’ I can still hear his voice providing quips of simple, but powerful guidance that I try to live up to every day. Things like:
Treat everyone with dignity and respect
Think before you speak
Work hard
Be resourceful
Keep your word
Treat others as you would want to be treated
I deeply enjoyed talking with my dad. He was a great listener, and always thoughtful. I am going to miss our conversations profoundly. I wish so badly that I could go back in time, and stay up late to see my dad when he returned home from work. He would put down his lunchbox, and I could give him a hug, catching the scent of fresh paper and print on his coat before we settle in to talk about tennis, or something he fixed with plastic welder, or a problem with the mower…
My dad didn’t like to brag, but had so much to be proud of. We all miss him dearly, and are grateful to have had him as our father.
