Ecce Homo

I have heard it said that nothing brings home one’s mortality more than the death of one’s last remaining parent. You now stand at the door, looking into the abyss, with no comforting generational buffer between you and eternity. My Dad just passed on, but I don’t feel that way at all. I have many emotions: I am sad for the grief I sense in my wife, my children and grandchildren, and my siblings. I am relieved that Dad’s suffering is at an end. I am grateful for the life and upbringing he (and my Mom) gave me. Mostly I am proud of the Man he was.

Charles William Neary, Chuck (but never, ever “Chucky,”) was the eldest child of Charles Joseph and Loretta (Vollrath) Neary. He was born on June 4th, 1929, and he liked to insist the market crash was not his doing. That was Chuck, always quick with a quip. If he didn’t invent the concept of “dad jokes” he almost certainly perfected it.

The eldest of twelve siblings, he was in some respects an extra parent to the youngest ones. Like his father, he was a good enough athlete to entertain notions of being a player, but too grounded to pursue them. In the early twentieth century, boys played sports, men held jobs. He was a quick study, and even briefly attended the University of Notre Dame, but couldn’t hack working a union job at the local Bendix factory with his father, attending classes, and commuting from their home in distant LaPorte, Indiana. At the same time.

His father wanted him to stay and support the family; Chuck wanted to get married and leave. He could easily recall the epic fistfight he and his Dad had in front of the family home when he decided against his father’s will. Chuck enlisted in the Army; a way to leave with dignity while setting the stage to marry Delores. His brief stint in uniform was uneventful, and he returned to LaPorte with his bride, until the fateful day when he soon got another telegram from the War Department directing him to return to duty due to the Korean war.

Chuck had learned to type in high school, so he was assigned as a personnel specialist to a division HQ. Through an accounting mis-classification, he found himself re-assigned as a combat infantryman just as the Chinese sent a million volunteers south to stop the United Nations advance. He never seemed traumatized by the months in combat, but he never talked that much about them, either. When he finally returned again to Indiana, he traded the olive drab of Army life for the navy blue of the Indiana State Police.

If the Irish cop is a stereotypical character, Chuck was straight from central casting. His had a wry sense of humor, was a quick and excellent judge of character, coupled with a friendly style that served him well. He lucked into a local starring role during the manhunt for a fugitive who killed a sheriff and eluded the police. Chuck literally chased him down in a foot race and became above-the-fold news in Chicagoland. He later helped pioneer a traffic speed enforcement program which placed police cars (driving the speed limit) abreast on highways; whoever tried to pass was arrested for speeding. One can’t print what he was called on the CB radios those days.

Sadly, he was as bad at office politics as he was good at policing. He found himself on the wrong end of several changes in leadership, stifled in his career and sometimes punished just for not taking sides. At one point, Chuck was sent to the ultimate dead-end job: the sole police officer assigned to investigate crimes within the Indiana State Prison. When I asked him once what was so bad about it, he said, “the victims are criminals, the witnesses are criminals, the perpetrators are criminals, everybody lies, and nobody really cares what happens.”

Chuck somehow survived that experience and got a fresh start as the Commanding Officer at a new post near Lowell, Indiana. He excelled in the leadership role, and eventually rose to headquarters in Indianapolis, where he was chief of investigations. He later admitted HQ was far too political a place for a no-nonsense detective like him. He retired from the force as an official “Legend of the Indiana State Police” although he continued to work security and investigatory jobs for years more.

When Delores became incapacitated after failing to rehab from a knee replacement, he became her full time care-giver. She refused a wheelchair or an electric scooter. He literally carried her around, or wheeled her from place to place in one of those chair/step-stool devices meant for home improvement jobs. He cared for her thusly till the day she died.

All those details are the stuff of his biography. They are things about him, but not him. What I could barely ever fathom was the “how” he was the “who” he was. Police work is legendarily the realm of workaholics, cops being on-call all day, every day. Yet Chuck was an omnipresent figure in my childhood: on the parish council, coaching the baseball team, running the school’s Presidential physical fitness test. At times I wished he wasn’t always around, like when he called me “Neary” so that he didn’t show any favoritism among the other team members. Perhaps the fact he often showed up in uniform was a detail I missed at the time: somehow he crammed thirty hours of activities into every twenty-four-hour day.

The man loved to drive, and he drove very fast. As a child I remember keeping tabs on how many cars he passed when we went on a long vacation drive. It exceeded a thousand. After all those years as a trooper, he was comfortable driving, and it was very hard to finally get his grip off the steering wheel. And yes, it’s genetic, just ask my daughters.

Chuck had a temper, and he could be overly strict. Between his upbringing and career, he tended to view the downside of things more than the positives: you can’t witness the worst of people and things all the time and not be affected. That manifested itself in views that were stereotypical and emblematic of his times. He fought to overcome the urge to voice thoughts which he later regretted, but you could see him struggling with the difference between what he thought and what he knew he shouldn’t say.

He was always his own man, very sure of who he was, and what he could or couldn’t do. If the man had a midlife crisis, it passed before lunch. If he pondered any existential dread, he shrugged it off with a so-what. His Catholic faith was enough for him.

He was clever, but always regretted not finishing a college degree. After a few beers on a Saturday afternoon, he once told me “being right all the time” was his biggest problem: “people resent it.” He was right about that, too. He probably didn’t realize how unusual that talent is.

In a modern twist on an Irish tradition, we loved to fight. Dad and I always engaged in battles of wits whenever we got together. Like the scene from his favorite movie “The Quiet Man,” we enjoyed the contest more than the result. I’d make an overly strong comment, Dad would object, and off we went. At times the argument would go on-and-on, each trying to find a new opening or point of attack. On more than a few occasions, we ended up completely changing sides during the argument: what mattered was the fight itself.

Chuck’s Dad died at sixty-three from a debilitating neurological disorder. The grandfather he never knew died at forty-two (kidney failure), great granddad at sixty-four (gastric ulcer). I once told him–based on our paternal history–my goal was to live to forty and anything more than that was “extra time.” Chuck lived to ninety-four, and I’m in year twenty-four of extra time. Maybe the genes aren’t all that bad.

In his final years, Chuck became a mainstay at his parish, then at his retirement community. He rediscovered his inner ham, playing the lead roles in several plays there. He found another chance at romance with Sharon, who was his companion and eventual caregiver to the end. His heart simply refused to stop beating although it declined from sixty-to-forty-to-twenty percent effective, and he needed to move into assisted living. When my sister asked him which facility he wanted to move to, he simply pointed up.

At 5:17 this past Tuesday morning, I woke up. I usually wake up around 6:00 am, a habit from years of military and government service. This was different. I went and said my morning prayers, then started my daily reading, when I got an e-mail from my brother-in-law asking that I call my sister immediately. Dad had hit the call button around 5:30, and had died shortly thereafter. I can’t help but think he gave me one last shove that morning, a little “get ready, you’re next in line.”

I loved the man, warts and all. His entire extended family, of which he was literally the paterfamilias, will miss him dearly.

Behold the Man.