Henry Clay Gray Eulogy (by Richard Lynn Gray, 1987)

Eulogy
Assignment #1
May 30, 1987

Richard Gray

Death and Dying

SW 731
Shirley L. Patterson
Summer 1987
The University of Kansas
School of Social Welfare

Eulogy for Henry Clay Gray

May 21, 1919 - January 30, 1960

Henry Gray was a man who overcame obstacles. He overcame the childhood injury of being run over by a school bus. He overcame growing up in a family that lost everything in the depression. He overcame being relocated from the hills of the Tennessee-Kentucky border to the dustbowl plains of south-central Kansas. He overcame his own relative lack of marketable skills and managed to support his family in times of economic hardship.

He lost his mother to cancer and experienced the loss of two children being miscarried or stillborn. He lost part of his health when he was run over by that school bus. He lost one career when he was drafted. He lost another part of his health in the United States Army during World War II. Through it all there was something he always kept.

He was a proud, stubborn, silent, self-reliant, strong willed, hard working, and independent man capable of strong emotions which he had difficulty expressing. He was never comfortable with his words or his feelings, but he was always comfortable with his hands and the fruit of their labor. When one of his sons needed expensive medical care at a time when health insurance was non-existent, he managed somehow to keep the bills paid and groceries on the table. When his son needed tutoring to keep from dropping behind in school, he was able to pay a teacher with garden vegetables and home canned goods. When his son needed blood transfusions, he was able to go, hat in hand, to his friends and business associates asking them to give a pint of their best. Yet, he always remained part stranger even to those who loved him.

At different times he was and did all of the following: soldier, watch repairman, sewing machine repairman, mechanic, carpenter, small businessman, deputy sheriff, truck farmer, bootlegger, used car dealer, school board member, notary public, housebuilder, and landlord. He supported his family with as many as five self-employed jobs at a time. A year before his death he acquired a Graduate Equivalency Diploma to make up for his having to quit high school twenty years before.

He was also, at different times, a son, brother, husband, friend, and father to the different people who cared about him. His widow remembered that he frequently recited the twenty-third psalm as he drifted off to sleep.

He left behind him two sons and two daughters. Today, six of his grandchildren grace the face of the earth with their smiles and peels of laughter. If it is true that "by their fruits, ye shall know them" then, we know Henry Gray to have been a good and fruitful man.