Eulogy

A son says goodbye to a father whose heart he could not know.

Thank you for coming to this memorial service for my father, David Michael Starsky. In case you don’t know me, I’m Ken Starsky, his only child. As I look around, I see mostly people I don’t know. So you have likely come here out of a sense of obligation. I appreciate your presence, and, at the same time, I find it really sad that we don’t know each other.

My father was a quiet, often remote, man, and I guess he was sad a lot. I think we all had trouble understanding that and having patience with it. Some people thought that he was cold. He was something of a mystery. There were parts of his life and things he left behind that no one seems to know about. No one who knew him prior to 21 years ago is here. He was like a painting. We could see the front side of him, but not what was behind, not the fullness of his measure. Today I hope that I can speak of him in a way that will help you remember him a little differently.

My mom always said that he had such sorrow in him, there was barely room for anything else, not even her love. You probably know they never married. When I called to tell her that Dad had suddenly died, she said, “Well, I guess his heart finally finished breaking.”

You may know that my father was in the Army and then was a cop in California in the seventies. But he didn’t talk about those years. It’s really odd to think of him as a cop. He was severely wounded in a shooting in California in 1979. Once he told my mom that then his police partner was killed just a few days after he got out of the hospital. His partner apparently was driving my father’s car and it had been wired to blow up, and my dad saw it happen. Right after that, he moved from California back to New York to be close to family. My mom was a physical therapist, and that’s how they met.

She thought that his underlying sadness-she called it ‘melancholy’-was because of the trauma to his heart. It had actually stopped when he was in a coma after being shot. Mom said his whole life changed then because he couldn’t be very active and he had to give up his old life. She said he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression and that a lot of people who have had catastrophic events in their lives are never the same. My father carried a lot of pain, both physical and emotional. I have always wondered what he was like before.

Dad was the one who named me Kenneth Richard, even though I heard it caused quite a row in the Starsky family because of a generations-old tradition of including ‘Michael’ in the name of a first-born son. My mom said that he was adamant about naming me. But then he always called me ‘Buddy,’ not Kenneth or Richard, so I don’t really know why he gave me my name.

My dad always made time for me, and I grew up knowing how much he wanted me in his life. My favorite memories are of us playing with his train set that he finally gave me when I turned 10 and of playing on a Little League team he helped coach for a year when I was 8. Those were the times I heard him laugh the most. You may not believe this, but he could be silly, like a kid himself, when he got in the moment and seemed to forget everything else. It just didn’t happen that often.

Dad loved junk food, and nobody could eat more of it than him. Even though next week would be just his 56th birthday, it’s a wonder he lasted this long. It’s a good thing my mom was such a careful cook, because with Dad, it was hamburgers and french fries when he was “eating healthy,” and the rest of the time it was bologna and pastrami and salami, candy bars, donuts, cokes, raspberry ripple ice cream, and hot dogs with onions, relish, chili, cheese, mustard, ketchup, and anything else he saw. Except there was this one funny thing he would do. He would give me a cup of yogurt and sprinkle it with granola that he called “butterfly bones.”

I think it says a lot about my father that he kept certain things for so long. Like his silver ring with the square blue stone. I don’t know how or when he got it. Mom said he had it when she met him. When they took it off his finger and gave it to me at the hospital 3 days ago, it was the first time I ever saw it off his hand. It’s back on his hand now, because obviously he treasured it and for reasons we don’t know.

He also had all these pictures of me that he had taken since I was a baby (along with my first Little League hat, which he used to try to wear), and pictures of his late brother and their mom and dad-who was also a police officer, I understand. And Dad had kept all these old pictures of someone who must have been a friend of his-my mom thought that it might have been his police partner, the one who was killed. He had written “Hutch” on some of them. My dad is in some of those pictures, laughing like I rarely saw. And apparently, he had a red car that he really loved, considering all the pictures he had of it. There’s one with somebody else’s handwriting on the back with what must have been the punch line to some joke: “It’ll never happen to us, Starsk. Because of me and thee and the striped tomato.” It’s kind of funny to think that my dad, who was such a quiet and sad guy, ever had a car like that.

Dad had recently sold his house. It was less than a week ago that he and I were packing his things. He wouldn’t let me throw out this really ugly red piggy bank, some raggedy blue stuffed toy that had not been mine, an old guitar that he didn’t play, and a bottle I couldn’t even get open. I had to wash off the label to read it. Maybe there’s somebody in the world who knows why he would keep an old bottle of blackstrap molasses, but I have no idea.

I guess that’s part of what I’m trying to say. My father was a good man who guarded what was hidden in his heart. But nobody seemed able to get close to him and know what was there.

As we come to the close of this commemoration of David Starsky, I hope I was able to give you more of a sense of who he was-this solitary man that many of you respected but did not consider ‘friend.’ I hope he’s happy to be released from this life and that he’s with someone who knew his heart and loved him.