EULOGY FOR JOHN N. SIMENSEN JR.

Note: John’s funeral was on Friday, March 03, 2023, in Michigan. I was asked to give a eulogy as part of the ceremony. This is the text of what I read that day.

Years ago, when my Mom and John were dating but before they got married, the Simensens lived in Fairfield and us Flynns lived in Oxford. Sometimes we’d spend the weekend at their apartment, and sometimes John would come stay at our place.

One weekend night, Matt had a few friends over, and we were all hanging out in the basement area. One of them went upstairs to get a drink or snack or something, and when he came back down, he gave us a funny look and said, “Did you guys know there’s some dude in your kitchen in his underwear, smoking a cigarette and drinking a glass of milk?”

“Yeah,” we said. “That’s John.”

And that was John, wasn’t it? He was a man who was going to live his life the way he saw fit, no matter what the circumstances.

And it makes sense, right? I mean, imagine this man. Imagine being 21 years old, on the eve of going to Vietnam, finding yourself on fire on the side of the road in rural California. Instead of serving your country as you had trained for, hoped for, and eagerly anticipated, you instead spend the remainder of war not on the water with your fellow airmen, but in military hospitals around the country. Surgeries, procedures, endless rehabilitation. You shouldn’t have survived. You almost didn’t.

Imagine experiencing all that, and now you’re medically discharged, still in your early 20s. No Navy now, no work, no nothing.

John was disabled. We don’t talk about that much because he never made a big deal out of it, but it was a big deal. Skin grafts, imitation ears and nose, a left hand mangled so much by gangrene and Marine doctors that his brother Jim sometimes took to calling it “The Paw”. 

He became disabled as a young man, and it was the most defining moment of his life up to that point. The remarkable thing, to me, was that he didn’t allow it to define what the rest of his life would be.

Imagine yourself in that situation. Would you drink? Would you dabble with drugs? Would you hole yourself up in a dark room in your parent’s house in Virginia and hide from the world?

Or would you do what John did – make a conscious decision to not give a damn and live life the way you see fit? If you did, it might take you to California to see one brother fresh out of the service, travel to Europe to see another still in the service in Germany. You might go to Italy to see the places your father, John Sr. was stationed during WW2. And you just might meet a French woman in the Latin Quarter of Paris and fall in love with her.

That woman was Liliane. They married and had three kids: Emily, Yann, Melissa. They lived first in the States, then moved back to France. He raised his kids there, finally learned French at the cafes in Livry-Gargan. Divorced, he moved his kids back to Ohio, where he met my Mom, Betty. Helped raise another set of kids: my brothers and me, Matt, Joe, and James. Went back to college in his 40s, got a degree, braved the wild wild west that is student teaching, then got a job at Talawanda High School before retiring. 

John and mom moved to New Bern, North Carolina in 2006, where he spent his time fishing, crabbing, sailing, playing chess incessantly, and eating seafood like it was going out of style.

These are just the broad strokes, of course, but this was a life. More than fifty years after he was supposed to have died in that accident and was sure he would, he spent that time living, as authentically as he knew how. 

Some of that was good: how true and honest and genuine friend he was, how gracious a host (especially if he got to make homemade crab cakes for his guests), how much he loved children in general, and his grandchildren in particular -- how much he wanted to make sure they remembered him.

But some of it was not so good: his inability or complete disinterest in taking care of his health or curbing that big appetite of his, staying up and milling around the house at all hours of the night, constantly falling asleep standing up, how picky he was about food at restaurants, or, I don’t know, playing the harmonica at so many inopportune times.

Oh, that damn harmonica. When we were in France together this past summer, I can’t tell you how many times he would whip that thing out and play it in public, at a café or even on the airplane — the airplane! — and the looks he would get from strangers.

I still don’t know if he didn’t realize it or just didn’t care, but again, that was John. For better or worse, he was going to do exactly what he wanted to do. He was stubborn that way.

But the good outweighs the bad, doesn’t it? I think, most of all, having been injured so young made John more prone to find the joy and the pleasure in life. He told me once that when he was a young man, he was too vain, too self-involved, didn’t think of others nearly enough. That changed.

I remember being an angsty young man myself, upset or brooding or emo about something that I’m sure didn’t deserve all that energy, and him looking me in the eyes, saying to me, “You need to learn not to take life so seriously.” For some parents, this would be a tossed off comment, a slapdash bit of advice, an aside. “Hey, lighten up, kid!”

But I remember it after all these years because it was clear that for John, this was learned wisdom, a guiding philosophy. After all, how much did he, like his father before him, love a good joke (the dirtier the better)? How quick was he to laugh? How often did he would punctuate a sentence with a chuckle?

You can hear that right now, can’t you? John’s laughter. This is difficult time for all of us, losing someone we loved so much: a devoted friend, a fishing buddy, a distant relative, a father, a grandfather, a brother, a husband. 

But all I know to help get through it is to focus on the way he lived and try to emulate it as best we can: with laughter, with a big appetite, with some harmonica music, or maybe, just maybe, a glass of milk in our underwear. Who knows what’s in store the rest of the day, but I think that’s what he would have wanted.

I love him, I miss him, and I’m honored and grateful to be able to speak today in remembrance of him. Thank you for giving me that opportunity. Thank you.