{"id":12365,"date":"2018-10-27T06:06:31","date_gmt":"2018-10-27T13:06:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simonburrow.com\/?p=12365"},"modified":"2018-09-20T11:44:15","modified_gmt":"2018-09-20T18:44:15","slug":"gary-david-11-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/?p=12365","title":{"rendered":"Gary David, 11 Years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>My good friend, Gary David, died about 11 years ago. I still miss his wisdom and his humor. Here is the eulogy I wrote for him:<\/p>\n

When Barbara spoke to me about saying a few words today she asked: \u201chow do you tell about a whole life in a few minutes?\u00a0 The answer is that you don\u2019t, you can\u2019t, but we honor Gary\u2019s memory by trying.\u00a0\u00a0 I want to spend my few minutes remembering Gary\u2019s intellect over his entire life.<\/em><\/p>\n

During the last few years Gary had to suffer a lot of pain and it changed him, often for the worse.\u00a0 We need to remember him for all that he was.\u00a0 When he learned, after five years of intermittent but horrible pain, that he had terminal cancer he said to me: \u201clife is uncertain, drink your good wine first.\u201d\u00a0 Gary had a very good collection of wine.\u00a0 And he graciously shared the good ones.<\/em><\/p>\n

To be complete we should stipulate that (stipulate is a lawyering term which means roughly; \u201cagree without argument\u201d) Gary was an excellent father and husband.\u00a0 We can also stipulate that in rush hour traffic he drove passively in the slow lane, that he was an enthusiastic skier, a natural scuba diver and that he was a loyal Democrat.<\/em><\/p>\n

When Alexis was young he taught her that when he said \u201cRonald Reagan\u201d she should reply \u201cyucky, yucky, yucky\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Gary and I spent nearly 20 years talking.\u00a0 We were neighbors and friends and for many years Gary was my companies lawyer.\u00a0 He kept me out of jail.\u00a0 Finally for 5 years we shared office space in Pasadena.\u00a0 During all of that time we discussed everything.\u00a0 Discussed is the polite way of saying that we argued.\u00a0 We argued about baseball, politics, religion, farm policy, fighting wild fires, global warming and the right amount of kick to use when swimming laps in a small pool.<\/em><\/p>\n

When Gary argued it was adversarial but without animosity.\u00a0 He argued to discover facts and he used those facts to find the best available solutions.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t incriminate or personalize an argument and he never attacked the messenger.\u00a0 He saw thing the way they were not the way he wanted them to be.
\nGary tried to discover the truth and in doing that he enriched the lives of those around him, in business and in his community.<\/em><\/p>\n

Gary\u2019s intellectual honesty will be missed.\u00a0 He died to soon.\u00a0 As Laurence Gonzales wrote in his book Deep Survival: \u201cperhaps we have to accept the fact that the light that burns the brightest, burns half as long.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My good friend, Gary David, died about 11 years ago. I still miss his wisdom and his humor. Here is the eulogy I wrote for him: When Barbara spoke to me about saying a few words today she asked: \u201chow do you tell about a whole life in a few minutes?\u00a0 The answer is that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[436,437],"class_list":["post-12365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-simon-says","tag-eulogy","tag-gary-david"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p99jGb-3dr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12365"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12372,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12365\/revisions\/12372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}