Im Maiya and i’m larry’s granddaughter. i’m gonna start this off by saying that I know none of us want to be here today. This is the last thing that we all want to be doing on a Tuesday morning, but here we are. Celebrating the life of the man that made an impact on everyone. Whether it was through a smile, a hug, a funny joke, a long sit down conversation over drinks, or just a wave as you were passing by, you would never forget him.
Before I get into my story about me and my grandparents, I want to show you all a voicemail I found of him yesterday that I think brings out his personality perfectly. (play voicemail). As you all can tell, he was never afraid to speak his opinion and that was one of my favorite things about him. With that I am going to share a story from me and him. A Ever since i was a little girl hitting golf balls in my grandma and grandpas back yard, i knew that they were going to be some of the biggest supports in my life, and when my grandpa started to get really sick about 7 years ago when he went septic i knew i had to be the biggest supporter for him. I was there to cheer him on every step of the way until the day he came home to that homemade welcome sign from me. He was the strongest man that I have ever met and he fought everyday of his life to be here for his family and especially his wife and grandkids. Without a doubt my grandpa larry was perfect. He was a perfect Father, Husband, Brother, and especially grandpa. So grandpa, welcome home. Enjoy those crown and 7’s, play all the golf you can, and only listen to shut up and dance with me. I will not ever forget you until the day that i meet you again. You’ve got this old man, i love you. And by the way i think that grandpa would want all of the kids in audience to know that randall from monsters inc. will forever live in his basement and all of your basements.
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Maddie Danahay’s (Granddaughter) Funeral Speech
Where to begin? for the longest time i knew in my heart that my grandpa was going to be taken from us too soon. he was the biggest goofball i know; he was always up to no good. you would look at him and he would have the biggest grin on his face and all you would do is wonder "what has he done this time?" he would constantly be teasing me about bovs and telling me how i was never allowed to have a boyfriend or about the monsters in the basement, but most importantly, he would constantly be telling me how beautiful i am. he would always tell me "you look marvelous, young lady" and i wish i could hear him tell me that one more time. if he could see me right now, with how of a mess i am, he would still tell me these words. even when i was looking my worst, with the craziest hair or makeup on, he would tell me how beautiful i looked. of course, i would look at him with a "c'mon, don't lie to me" face and he would just laugh. his laugh made me laugh. when i was sad, he always knew how to cheer me up and put a smile on my face. he was so proud of the fact that he was the one who taught me how to do a backflip and gave me enough confidence to do it over and over. he would do his best to come to as many of my volleyball games that he could, or even my boring dance recitals. i would always do my best to help him in every way that i could. simple tasks like getting him water or handing him the remote are things that i wish i didn't take for granted because now i can't do them for him anymore. i will always think of him when i put crackers on my ice cream or crushed ice in my orange juice. i will never forget sleeping in between my grandma and grandpa in bed and how every time i would wake up, both of them would tell me how i kicked them all night. whether he was in the hospital or not, he always put a smile on his face, especially when he saw his grandkids. we always kept him on his toes. i don't know how, but he always seemed to keep my grandma on her toes more. he would make the dumbest jokes to her and bust out laughing about how funny he though he was. somehow, my grandma was always able to laugh at these jokes, but still adding a giggly "LARRY!" into the mix. and as most of you could guess, he was the biggest antagonist when my brother and i would fight. if i was mad at my brother and i would try to tackle and wrestle him, all i would hear was my grandpa giving me tips on how to hurt him the worst, win the fight, and rub it in his face. he was always on my side and rooting for me to do my best.
i hope i will never forget the sound of his laugh, the feeling of his hugs, or the way he smelled I every time i got to see him. i love you so much grandpa and i want vou to know i still sprint up the basement stairs to get away from randall.
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Dad’s Eulogy
My “Sick Dad”: My Dad was so jovial and had such a contagious laugh and he was so meticulous with how he looked that it was difficult for outsiders to understand his 24/7 pain and suffering. He regularly got the “Well you look so good” from people and his response was frequently “I may look good but I feel like shit”. If you can just imagine my Dad saying that. My Dad was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at age 32. This diagnosis came after a major accident at work where he filled a tire that was improperly manufactured on a larger rim and when he went to fill it, the tire exploded and sent his body across the entire room. He sustained a shattered wrist from this accident and after that accident, his constant body pains began. Plates in his neck, fused lumbar spine, knee replacement, hip replacement, shoulder replacement, spinal stimulators, recurrent kidney stones, hernia repairs, blood clots, IVC filter, aortic bypass and aneurysm repair, RFA treatments, Cortisone shots, nerve releases to all toes, many many dental procedures, injections and infusions for his RA treatment and needing oxygen for his worsening COPD. These are just some of the many but not all of the procedures or complications that he had. Then there were the hospitalizations for all those surgeries plus hospitalizations for complications such as cellulitis, a post operative lumbar spine infection, urinary tract infections, and pneumonias to name just a few. In 2016, he suffered multi-organ failure from septic shock due to a post surgical deep lumbar spine infection and we thought we were going to lose him. He was in the hospital for 5 weeks. After that hospitalization, he never returned to full functional ability however he had a strong will to live thus he carried on despite the many many complications and constant pain. Around Easter 2017, I was able to watch him pitch a baseball to my kids in his backyard and it was the best thing I had ever watched. I never thought I would see him play with my kids again. He had such an extensive medical history that medical providers that didn’t know him could never fully understand how much he had been through and they often misjudged him as someone seeking pain meds, which he never wanted because they didn’t work for him. His most recent scare was a dissecting aneurysm of his aorta which occurred in early July. Since the dissection, he was falling or passing out on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times a day. If a cat has 9 lives, my dad has 900. He fortunately was able to heal enough from his dissection to travel on an Alaskan cruise with my mom, his best friend, Ray Boden and his wife, Karen, Ray’s brother and his wife, and my mom’s brother, Bill and his wife, Susie. This was my Dad’s lifelong bucket list trip and he returned from the trip just a week and a half before his death. I was so fearful of losing him on that cruise because as a healthcare provider, he had shown me so many signs that his health had significantly deteriorated. I did not want my mom to have to handle a serious health situation or death on their cruise without us kids present. Before he left, I began wearing the rosary bracelet I had given to my Grandma Veronica when my Grandpa Bill died. I felt I needed daily prayer to get me through the time that they were on their trip. He fortunately was able to return home but contracted Covid on the trip which he surprisingly handled fairly well all things considered. On Thursday, August 24th he was walking into the orthopedic institute lobby for an appointment when he once again had a fall. This fall was different though. He had the sense of impending doom that morning before they left and he even told my mom his feelings. He was taken by squad from the lobby to the ER. He was alert when they loaded him into the ambulance, but during the transport, he lost his pulse. He underwent CPR for over 20 minutes before they were able to get a pulse back. I was in the middle of a clinic seeing my own patients in Omaha when my phone rang and I saw it was my Mom. She nevers calls during the day and when she called immediately back to back, I knew something was up so I excused myself from my patient’s room and called her. It was the call that I had been waiting for for quite some time but hoped would never happen. I spoke with both my Mom and the nurse. It was decided during that conversation to stop CPR and let my Dad go but by the time the nurse got back to the ED room, he had regained a pulse. By this time my brothers had arrived at my mom’s side and Dad was rushed to the CT scanner to try and identify the cause of his decompensation. It was found that he has massive pneumoperioneum in his abdomen, which essentially means he had air everywhere in his abdominal cavity where it shouldn’t be, likely from a sudden bowel perforation. Why this happened, they do not know. He was brought back to the ICU where he was requiring many medications to sustain his heartbeat but ultimately they were unable to regain a blood pressure. It was decided at that time, to take him off all supportive measures and let his body finally rest and be comfortable and pain free. He was surrounded by my mom, Brad, Lucas, Ally and his sister, Jean. I was present on the phone driving at the time of his death and was about at the Canton exit when he passed. Dad’s broken body was ready to go a long time ago, but his spirit and will to live remained. We all find comfort in the fact that his death happened quickly so that he did not experience any fear, regret or pain.
So, that’s my “Sick Dad” story. But now I am going to tell you about my Healthy Dad and my kids' beloved Grandpa.
My Dad. There’s so much to say about my Dad. He was my Mom’s world and his grandchildren were the apple of his eye. Every one of his grandchildren absolutely adored him. He was always so sassy, he was a jokester, and his belly laugh was absolutely contagious.
Dad was the hardest worker I ever knew and I know all three of us kids take after him with our work ethic. His navy work outfit and brown steel toe work boots are how I remember him during his working days. During my childhood, my dad was out of the house at dawn in order to get to the shop to check in inventory before the day started and he didn’t arrive home till 6:00. He came home every day for lunch where he would take a nap in his easy chair and my Mom would serve him his lunch on his lap. You never dared wake him up from his lunch nap. When we were finally school age and he had to start going to work a little later, I remember him driving me and Brad to school in his little 2 seater red stick shift Toyota truck. If it had snowed, we would leave a little extra early so we could go into the school parking lot and spin cookies with him.
There wasn’t an hour of the day that he wasn’t working. I remember many nights, weekends, holidays and birthdays where the phone rang and Dad would have to leave to go get a part for a customer, go on a wrecker call for a broken down vehicle or hustle to a fire or local emergency. I always remember being nervous when he went to a fire or on a wrecker call, probably because my mom seemed worried. We would all always patiently wait for him to return to proceed with whatever celebrations had been interrupted by his dedicated work ethic. I specifically remember a time when I was little when my mom was gone for the afternoon. I remember it was a Sunday because there was a golf tournament on the tv. I had clear instructions from Dad to not answer the phone if it rang because he was busy doing outdoor jobs at home and he didn’t want to be interrupted to go down to the shop to get a part for a customer. Well, the phone rang and I answered it. Looking back, I think I was hoping it was my Grandma Truman so I could ride my bike over to her house to drink tea and eat cheese and crackers with her because I was so bored that day. Well, it wasn’t Grandma Truman and when I had to go get Dad to come to the phone to talk to a customer he was so mad at me. So when he left to go down to the store, I went and hid so he couldn’t find me when he came back. He wouldn’t have done anything but yell at me but I still didn’t want to face him. So, I crawled in this back corner of the living room behind a couch and table where we threw blankets and I hid under there all afternoon. Golf was on tv the entire time and I was miserable because it was so boring. When he came home and yelled “Jillianne Marie” for me, I didn’t come out and stayed under those blankets listening to boring golf. I remember Nick Faldo won that tournament and I think my love for watching golf on Sunday afternoons started that day. Oh, and he is the only one in my life that ever calls me Jillianne Marie except for recently when the nurses and respiratory therapists I work with in ICU found out my full name. Now, they yell Jillianne Marie at me when I order things for them to do that they don’t want to do.
I’ve never met a man that was more meticulous about his hair and his hands. My mom always cut my Dad’s hair because she was the only one he would trust. He was always so worried about his hair. He used a hair dryer every day and hair sprayed it perfectly into place with his brown goody brush. He was also always so worried about his hands. I remember my mom telling me he never wanted anyone to be able to refer to him as a “grease monkey” because of his profession so this resulted in him having the most heavy duty bar of soap and scrub brush in the shower in order to meticulously scrub every ounce of oil and dirt from his hands and fingers every single night when he got home from work.
“Not Me” lived in our house when we were little, at least that’s what my dad would say. He would ask who made a mess or who did this or that and we would answer “Not Me”. He always told us he wanted to meet “Not Me”. There was a time that he was so mad that there were so many shoes at the bottom of the stairs that he took them all and threw them in the backyard. When we started yelling at him to stop, his response to us was that ”Not Me” could go and get them cause we told him that’s who put the shoes there in the first place.
“Man about a horse”. My Dad always told us that he was “going to see a man about a horse” when he went to leave the house. As we grew older, we realized that was code for him going to do something he didn’t want us to know about like Christmas or birthday shopping for us with my mom.
My dad taught me how to ride a bike. I remember he taught me on a red bike in the front lawn. I’m pretty sure the event ended with me throwing the bike down and stomping away. Learning to drive a car had a similar ending. My dad did that with me too, only he took me out to a gravel road and parked our little white stick shift Toyota Camry on an uphill slant. After I had multiple attempts to try and go but ended up killing the car, I jumped out of the car stomping off and saying I was walking back home. If you can only imagine him driving slowly up to me on that gravel road and laughing his belly laugh at me because he knew he set me up for failure. I still was not allowed to drive until I knew how to drive that stick shift car.
“Falling Rock”. Everyone in our family knows who Falling Rock is. My Dad told us that Falling Rock was an Indian that hides in the Black Hills and pushes rocks down the hills onto the streets and cars. If you’ve ever been out to the Black Hills, you know there are Falling Rock signs everywhere. The Hills were our typical summer family vacation getaway. As soon as my Dad would see a Falling Rock sign, he would tell us kids we had to start looking out our windows up into the top of the hills to keep an eye out for the Indian for him.
My dad was great at making us the most fantastic backyard tire swings. He would twist me up as high as his head and let me spin in circles then watch me try and walk after. I also remember one summer he made us a new swing and he was pushing Lucas and the neighbor boy, Austin Hansen. He pushed and pushed them as high as he could until the neighbor boy puked which my dad thought was hysterical. Speaking of puking, I will never forget one winter day where my mom made tacos for lunch and after lunch dad was going to take us sledding to Heizman’s Hill. Brad and I were finished, and picky Lucas was sitting there refusing to eat his taco. Like multiple other occasions, Dad insisted Lucas had to eat before we could leave. After some time, Luke finally ate that taco and before he could get up from the table it came right back up onto the plate. If you know my dad, you know he doesn't do well with puking kids or dirty diapers and he was so mad that Lucas puked. I just remember Mom yelling at Dad because this was the typical expected end result from Lucas, after all, he was such a pukey kid that we called him Luke the Puke.
Halloween. My Dad loved to play pranks on Halloween only they weren't the type of pranks you would expect. He would occasionally dress up as a dummy on a bench and scare kids, but what he really liked to do was serve kids things like a piece of lettuce, or a scoop of green beans or a scoop of peas into their treat bags just to see their response. He loved the kids that would give him a response like “I don’t want peas or I don’t like that”. He would just laugh and laugh.
The Basement Monster. My Dad loved telling all of his grandchildren that there was a monster named Randall from Monsters Inc that lived in his basement or in the storm drain in the park behind their house. Every child at some point has been terrified of my parents' basement because of my Dad and that darn monster that lived down there.
And then there was the ornrey Dad. This side of Dad used to come out when he was sick and then started to feel better. That was your sign that things were going in the right direction. He was the naughtiest patient for nurses and my mom. I remember one time when he was in the hospital and my mom and I went to pick him up for discharge. As we were walking down the hall, we started seeing crumpled up newspaper balls being thrown out of a patient’s room into the hallway. Well, what do you know, as we approach these newspaper balls we realize they are coming from my Dads room. He was up in a chair waiting for us and had his call light on and nobody was answering so he decided to send out his own smoke signal to get their attention.
My dad dearly loved my Mom, he loved us kids, he adored his grandchildren, he cherished his business and he appreciated his community. He loved to read and he was a wealth of knowledge about the outdoors and animals. There was always a National Geographic on his table by his easy chair. He loved the Chicago Bears, he loved his red and white ‘56 Chevy which was the same car he had in high school, he loved the music of the 60s and he would always take any type of a sweet blended beverage. He enjoyed time with his lifelong best friend, Ray. He was looking forward to watching Austin play his senior year of football and I think he purchased half of the Mount Michael Bookstore apparel last time he was down to the school. Austin caught the first touchdown pass of the game last Friday and I know that it was a touchdown sent from Heaven. He really looked forward to watching Maddie play her first year of high school volleyball because he certainly did not enjoy sitting through her dance recitals. And of course, he was ready to follow Miss Maiya around on every golf course he could possibly get to as she makes her collegiate debut golfing for Morningside University. Sunday night, he even sent down a hole in one for my brother, Lucas as he, Brad, Maiya and Jon Sorensen played a round on Beresford’s course in order to try and distract themselves for a while. Everyone was in tears after that ball dropped into the hole because they knew it was from Dad. Yesterday afternoon, multiple signs from Dad occurred. Lucas passed a trailer that was towing a 56 Chevy just like Dad’s. And, I went to wash my car and when I got back into my vehicle, my radio station was on Boomer radio. I did not have that station programmed into my radio and I figured that I must have accidentally switched the station while cleaning. I smiled as I realized what station it was on and thought it was a sign from Heaven until the song “Puff the Magic Dragon” by Peter, Paul and Mary immediately started playing. At the end of the song, the radio DJ said he had never in his life played that song on the radio but something inside him made him decide to play it. That record was my and my Dad’s favorite and we played it all the time when I was little. “Leaving on a Jet Plane” is what we danced to at our father/daughter dance at my wedding. I called my Mom right away to tell her what had happened and when I got out of my vehicle, I found a shiny penny heads up. He even blessed me with two cold sores in the past 24 hours. All of these things tell me that my Dad is still with us. We will cherish all the silly Snapchat photos he took with his grandkids and the sassy voicemails he left all us. Dad, we all love you and we are going to miss you so much but we are so relieved that you are finally no longer suffering and you are now pain free. Be our guardian angel now and forever.
In response to "What did you learn from Larry?"
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Larry, Ray and I were good friends in high school…Ray was always the driver. We were stuck one night so Ray went to get help…in the meantime someone came along and Larry and I caught a ride to Btown. Sorry Ray ❤️
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