EULOGY - DAVID JAMES SMITH

 EULOGY - DAVID JAMES SMITH
30/3/1981 - 17/2/2023

[Editorial note: There is more in this written version of the eulogy than was delivered on the day of David's funeral. It will continue to be edited until all that needs to be said has been added.]

 

Today we gather to remember, to mourn and to celebrate the life and existence of David James Smith. I use the words life and existence together because there good reason to think that life is an aspect of existence. I hope to catch some sense of that in what I say about David today.

David was born in Ipswich, Queensland, on 30 March 1981 to Beris and Jim Smith. His elder brother and sister are Michael and Wendy. We extend our condolences to Jim and Beris, David’s partner Cassie and their children, Jasmin and Jayden, To Michael and Denni, and to Wendy and her children Chloe, Nicola, Georgia and Nikita, and her husband, Steve; and also to the extended Bell and Smith families.

David grew up first in Ipswich and then, while still in high school, in Townsville where he attended TAFE to finish high school and do Certificate Three in Hospitality. He worked in the restaurant run by my partner and I. He also lived with us while a family friend, another bloke called Jim, renovated our house. David worked with Jim the builder for long enough to become a proficient carpenter. Somewhere in the mix he also became a very good cook who blessed his parents household after he moved in with them. He returned from Townsville to Ipswich in 1996 to go to America with Beris and Wendy. They visited Disneyland, Alcatraz, San Francisco, Yosemite National Park, San Diego Zoo, and crossed the border into Mexico - and came back in one piece. It was the kind of  trip that dreams are made of.

David stayed in Ipswich after that, working at various jobs and eventually started working with Jim in his tree-lopping, lawn mowing and handyman business. In due course, though Jim continued to work with him, David assumed responsibility for the business, as you will see in the photo tribute made by John Walters, as the names on the door of the trucks change from PJ & BE Smith to D & P Smith. Commitment is not inherited but it is almost certainly learned. David stands in an exemplary line of blokes who could turn their hand to almost anything: his father, Jim; Jim's father, Peter; and Jim's maternal grandfather, Jack, whose praise Freddy Mercury might have sung: We are the champions!

As a child, David spent a lot of time in the Boys Brigade and playing and refereeing soccer. In his youth David and Michael were into trail bike riding and camping. Alas, there are no photos of David with Michael in the slide show. The abiding joy of David’s childhood were his dogs. You’ll see in the slide show that he had a number of canine friends, and one of them, the beautiful Freckles, is here with us today.

In the slide show you’ll see pictures of David looking very much at home in trees. When Jim and I and our late elder brother, Philip were kids, we spent a lot of time in trees - especially big old mango trees whose lower branches we reached on ladders. From there up to as close to the crown as we could get without breaking the branch it was a race and a competition. Later in life I had a job teaching kids to rock climb and abseil. I have seen a lot of agile and fearful activity in high and dangerous places. David’s agility in trees, was the equal of anything I ever saw. There’s a picture in the slide show that will take your breath away - the trunk of a pine tree reaching as high as the Tower of Babel, with David propped off the side. Given his affinity with animals one might wonder if David had an animal totem. You might think first of a monkey. But they’re not Australian mammals, so what marsupial is at home in trees? Possums, of course, specifically, Sugar Gliders that leap from tree to tree. As I leave this insufficiently detailed snapshot of David’s life, keep in mind this image of David Sugar Glider in mid flight between two trees, until we return to it after reflecting on his death.


Any sudden and unexpected death is confronting, especially if, as in David’s case, it ends in pain. At first I had no word for the impact of being told that David had died. How often do we say about something: “It’s unbelievable!” But disbelief was not an option. Shock is too ordinary a word for something so disruptive. A feeling of emptiness as a result of something being taken away gets close. You know the saying: nature abhors a vacuum. When something is taken away something else fills the vacuum. A real absence invites a real presence. But when the real presence, in the form of the beatitude, tried to fill the space left by David - you know the one: Happy are they who mourn for they shall be comforted - all I felt was a visceral anger. That's how I became aware of how severely my actual experience was, not for the first time, rejecting the comfortable outlook of being able to quote passages from scripture. That's when I realised that the word I was looking for is “unfair”. I suspect that everyone in this room has felt the unfairness of life. It’s so universal that there’s a book of the Hebrew Bible about it. The Book of Job.

A wealthy and - we are told at the outset - just and respected man has everything taken away from him and is afflicted with an awful skin disease. Three friends genuinely try to comfort him by telling him exactly what he would have told anyone else in his situation: Mate, they say, You’re a good bloke, but you know that good people prosper and bad people are punished. So you must have done something really bad to be copping it like this. For your own sake, you better fessup. Job gives two answers. The first is: Yes, I must have sinned, but please God! Tell me what I have done. His second answer, evolves over 25 chapters of forensic argument with his friends about his situation. It is quite startling. It amounts to this: No! You are wrong. I refuse to be bullied. As God is my witness, I am innocent. God, having been called as a witness, shows up. He gives Job a hard time for presuming to know the unknowable; nevertheless, he affirms what he said at the outset. Job is innocent. And he chastises Job’s friends for getting it so wrong. And he shows Job just how out of his depth he is by revealing the existence of two awesomely frightening and - more often than not - destructive beings: the Behemoth and the Leviathan. For your homework, read chapters 40 and 41 of Job (you can read the whole book in less than an hour and a half) and consult a couple of commentaries, making sure that at least one of them is by a Jewish scholar. All I will say about the Behemoth here is that it’s infinitely more terrifying than Drop Bears (so beloved of David in his childhood), and that like them it lies in wait for the unwary.

Two things arise from this account of the Book of Job. When your experience challenges what you think you are supposed to believe, don’t look away and don’t tell your experience that it’s at fault. Look directly at it to see in detail what is there to be seen. When you do that, God will come.

I looked at what was causing me to resist the beatitude. What I saw first was my own pain - how David’s death made me feel. Almost as soon as I saw that I was looking at my own pain I thought: but what about David’s pain! How much more terrible must that have been than mine! As soon as I shifted my focus from my pain to what really mattered, the beatitude came back - not as the feeling of happiness but as the feeling of being connected. God came. In these words: Not a sparrow falls to the ground that I do not cradle in my heart. Let’s be clear about what we’re seeing here. We’re not talking a cute cuddly little pet, but a fragile being that has fallen to the ground, as a broken heart in a lifeless body. This is what God is cradling in his heart. 

Is this telling us something about ourselves? Can we just accept and cherish the whole truth about ourselves and others without shame? Because in the end we are all fallen sparrows, even as we live.

It’s a good thing David was into science fiction because he’s about to become a shape shifter. Starting with him up there as a Sugar Glider on the side of that tree. He’s planning a leap across several tens of metres of space between the tree he’s in and this one over here. There’s a lot of open sky above. A lot of space for predators to lurk. But he’s been doing this all his life. There’s nothing about this leap - this leap of faith - that’s different from any previous. Except that this time, there is. He launches himself into the air and in mid flight his life is snatched away by… what… an eagle? No. The Behemoth. Probably in the shape of an eagle, for sure. As an eagle it’s doing what God made it to do. The Behemoth too cannot be thought of as an agent of evil, because it is God’s servant. Like the eagle, it’s doing the job God made it to do. And what is that? 

The Behemoth is the force of nature that drives us to do what we do. Without it we would never work. We would never aspire to achieve anything. We would never push the boundaries. We would never dare! By that very same token, we would never do things that bring us pain. No wonder God cradles every fallen sparrow in his heart. They fall out of the sky because that’s how he made them. 

Notice now that David has shape shifted from a Sugar Glider to a Sparrow. And now for one last time he shape shifts again into a Cannery. We are, after all, in Ipswich, a mining town where the Cannery in the mine is a saying that really does mean something. The fragile being whose death warns of the presence of the Behemoth in the form of poisonous gas. David’s death is a warning to us all about the Behemoth is the form of a society that isolates and poisons.

Finally I want to say that as a blood relative of David I am an uncle. But in a sense that few people in modern society understand, I am his Uncle - spelt with a capital U. There were key moments when we developed a mutual respect and trust that enables a relationship to grow from Teacher and Pupil to Elder and Peer. Here are three such moments. When he asked me about my experience as a soldier in Vietnam, it wasn’t vulgar curiosity but a genuine interest in what it was like to have PTSD. When he did something as an employee that merited instant dismissal, Jim, John and I talked him through the consequences of what he had done for us as a business, and told him that he still had a job. When he came to me for advice about the skills of seeking work and we spent the day talking about.. you know, stuff. There were many, many more encounters that deepened our mutual regard. Yet I didn't see this coming. I knew nothing about the pain that overwhelmed his life. I am so, so sorry. Nevertheless, because I know that who we are is not the same as what we do, I can say (in the present tense), with heartfelt conviction: You, David, are a good bloke. No one will say in my hearing and get away with it, that because your life ended in pain, you must have deserved it. Your life was driven to its end by God’s servant, the Behemoth. And in returning to whence you came - God’s heart - you are secure, forever.

The Book of Job, Translated by Stephen Mitchell (Audio book)

The Book of Job, Harold S Kushner

The Wisdom Literature, Kathleen M O'Connor