Thank you all for being here today and my apologies if you had any other plans. Unlike my father, I have never been known for my brevity. In fact, as a child I chattered away so persistently that my parents often joked that I must have been the milkman's son. However, I know my origins with rare specificity. You see, my father hadn't planned to have any children of his own, but was talked into it by my mother. She told him that he was too brilliant and too strange not to pass his genes along to another generation. Whether for love of her or simple vanity he went through with it and so, here I am. The son of Bruce Towne.

I know that affirming paternity isn't the usual stuff of eulogies, but that is a true story about my father and there was a time before his illness - if you can imagine a time before his illness - when he envisioned a person speaking only truth at his funeral, all the good and all the bad, everything in between. It was an idea he got from a favorite book by a favorite author, but unfortunately for him, his eulogy has been written and re-written over and over for the last twenty years, not by a great author or orator, but by his biggest fan.

Still, I will do my best to tell the truth and I hope that will be enough.

Enough.

That is an idea my father understood well. When I was editing this eulogy for the dozenth time, I realized that much as I loved my father, as many stories as I wanted to tell, what was most important to share with you all was a small, but special thing. Bruce Towne truly believed that he had enough, and because he believed he had enough, he was a more grateful, generous, and patient man than any I have ever known.

Now, as my young daughters know, "enough" isn't real unless you believe in it. We are born insatiable, always wanting more. We are far quicker to jealousy than generosity, and we rarely celebrate the satisfied, preferring, instead, stories of conquerors, colonizers, and strivers. My father, though, was a man of peace, at peace.

When we believe we have enough, it becomes trivial to show gratitude. We don't spend our energy thinking about what someone owes us, but instead reflecting on what we have already received. I was talking with my mother last week and mentioned how lucky I was to have my wonderful wife Amy. My mother shared that Bruce would look at her every single day, find something nice to say, and tell her how lucky he was to have her.

In the last year of his life he wrote to me to say that "Being a father has been so much more rewarding than I ever imagined it could be, and living long enough to see you become a father has been the cherry on top of my life sundae."

And to all of his children he wrote, "I was talking to your mother yesterday about what a great group of kids you are. We have an embarrassment of riches in our children. You are far and away the best part of my life by a mile."

Gratitude came easy to him.

When we genuinely believe that we have enough, it unlocks our generosity, it becomes second nature to look around and see and hear when other people do not have enough. I'll tell you a story now that I have told for 30 years, but its meaning has changed over time.

When I was in middle school my brother was a snowboarder and I thought that was just about the coolest thing in the world. So, when the annual ski & skate swap at the local high school came around, I begged my dad to take me over and buy me snowboard.

My brother had taught me how to find the right size for my body and I ran around looking for just the right thing. After a bit of searching, I managed to find one! The only one for sale that was just my size. I ran back to my father who took the board, nodded, told me to go find some boots, and went back to reading his book. I tried on several until I found a pair I liked and, beaming, returned to my father. As I approached, I saw him passing the board I had picked out to a woman who was thanking him profusely, then I watched her walk away with my snowboard under her arm.

I asked him what happened and he just said that she needed it. Her child needed it. I protested that there wasn't any other board there that was a fit for me, but of course the same would have been true for her kid, and so, seeing that, he had passed it along.

I was upset. And when I first told that story, as a child, the moral was what a jerk my dad was to give away my snowboard. As I got older, the story became about what a weird guy my dad was, to go to all the trouble of taking me there, picking things out, wasting a day, only to have never intended to get me a snowboard at all, you see I thought I had him figured out at that point.

Then, in my 30s, I knew I had cracked it, it was about self-sacrifice. About the idea that the only thing worth doing in this world is accepting worse outcomes for ourselves if it could create greater outcomes for the people around us. That was close to the truth, but then I became a father, something that brought him great joy, and I started to understand that story a with one final bit of nuance.

When you become a parent, suddenly you find yourself making new friends for the first time in potentially decades. At playgroups and school drop offs and team sports. I found myself surrounded by people who intensely believed that any behavior was acceptable if it was ostensibly meant to benefit their children. Even, and perhaps especially, if it would benefit their progeny at the cost of some other child. Seeing someone else's child receive something special would reignite their impulse to jealousy, to demanding their kid get just as much and more.

That sucking, endless pull of want.

My father loved us as deeply and truly as any parent has ever loved a child, but I think it would trivialize that love to say that he wanted the best for us. I believe he wanted us to have enough and to be free in our generosity.

So, knowing that I had enough, even if I was a bit too young to know that myself, it was trivial for him to be generous, to care about someone else's child, their want, their parent's need, above mine.

Imagine the world we could have if everyone who had enough believed they had enough and were able to just as easily care about another child as much as they do their own.

Understanding my father was often like that story, trying to draw lessons on how to live from Bruce was a studious thing. He didn't say much, so you had to observe, theorize, and draw conclusions. But once in a while he would come right out and tell me something he needed me to know, a lesson he wanted to make sure was clear as a bell. Typically it would be when he was learning a lesson himself.

During the months after he left IDX and before he got settled into his next career, I got to spend a lot more time with my father. We were on a drive one day when he asked me to dig out a John Prine cassette, he had something to tell me. He asked if I knew how quiet he was, I said ""yes". He asked if I had heard my Mother, asking him at the end of a long day, to talk to her a little more, I said "yes". I knew both of those things intimately, honestly. Both worried me sometimes. Well, he put on Angel from Montgomery for me, and teared up a bit. The line "How in the hell can a person, go to work in the morning, come home in the evening, and have nothing to say" played and he stopped the tape and explained:

How many ways had my mother tried to say that to him? And it wasn't until just the other day that he had heard that song for the thousandth time and it suddenly hit him like a ton of bricks. He hadn't been giving her enough. His best friend, she just wanted a little conversation, and though he had heard her asking, he hadn't understood until just a few days before.

Those were tense months, financially and emotionally, when he was out of work, but the whole time he was working on himself. He had had enough at IDX, another important thing to be able to know, and after shedding the weight of that, he looked around and realized that he had not been enough to my mother.

When we believe we have enough, we can see clearly the people who need more from us. My parents always had a wonderful marriage, truly, but those months were a turning point from my perspective, as their friendship was reignited by his presence, both physically and verbally. My father, having shed too large a burden, could finally see the burdens of the people he most loved and show up for them in a new way. And, in a remarkably generous, important act, he made sure his young son saw and understood the lesson he was learning. That day, and many after, taught me how to be a better husband to my wife before I ever ever met her.

Ok, alright, I know I've talked for quite a while here, too long really, I should have edited this down. I tried to, honestly. I don't know.

I promised at the beginning to tell the truth, and the truth is, there isn't enough.

Not really. It is important that we believe that we have enough, important to keep that faith, it lets us be better people, it lets us be more and give more to each other, I truly believe that.

But, 10 minutes telling you about my father? That isn't enough. An hour by his bedside the night before he died? It wasn't enough. A year of good conversations, dozens of messages saying all the things we worried we'd forget to say? Not enough. Twenty extra years and no, even that wasn't enough.

But I can believe it was. I will. I do. Because believing I had enough of him will make it easier for me to be generous with myself, to live in gratitude instead of regret, to be at peace. It wasn't enough, but I absolutely believe it was.