In Memory of Poppy
Eulogy for Stanley Malinowski
2/9/1932 - 1/22/2013
My heart is at ease today as we gather together to remember the life of my grandfather, Stanley Malinowski, because I know he is finally at peace. At the moment of his passing, for as sad as I was, I also felt relieved. I truly felt as though a great weight had been lifted. We all know how he has spent the last three years suffering from the loss of his wife, but the two tears in his eyes as he took his final breath let me know that he was seeing the love of his life, my grandmother Carolyn, again at last.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. We live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” 2 Corinthians 4:16-15:8
When a man has lived a life full of so much love and respect, it can be hard to encapsulate the many ways in which my he was amazing. He simply WAS. I struggled a little at first writing his eulogy, because Poppy was always the man behind the scenes, literally the man behind the camera or video camera. How do you condense down into a couple of minutes a man who did everything for me? For all his children and grandchildren? Poppy was so giving, and so selfless. He always knew the right course of action, practically and morally, and he did what needed to be done, as a father, a husband, a grandfather, a brother, an uncle-he accepted without question the path God laid before him, and he never complained. Born at home in South Amboy, the third of six children, he dreamed of being a pilot but instead he dropped out of school at Sacred Heart when he was just 14 years old so he could go to work at a labeling factory and help earn money to support the family.
When he was 18 he saw my grandmother playing handball in front of his house and said to his friends, “That’s her! That’s the girl I always wanted to meet!” He had seen her months before, but never had the courage to approach her until that day. For their first date, he took her to Stewart’s Hot Dog Stand in Morgan, and later when they went for a walk he leaned against an oak tree, took her in his arms and kissed her, and for the next 56 years his loyalty and devotion to her did not waver.
At age 19, without any formal training or education whatsoever, Poppy began what would turn out to be a lifelong career at Public Service, the company he stayed with for 36 years. He married Nanni when he was 22, they honeymooned in Miami, and then returned to New Jersey to start the family they both wanted. Poppy wanted as many kids as possible but they stopped at four after having Judi, Patti, Kathleen and Scott. In addition to working for PSE&G, it was not uncommon for Poppy to have a second, and sometimes a third job, which took time away from his wife and children, but also provided the support and sense of security that a growing family needs.
Poppy was such a hard worker, and he had the most capable hands. He was so strong, and so talented. He was so personable that he made friends everywhere he went or at any job he worked. He got to know the owner of a minibike place, and when Patti said she wanted one the guy told Poppy, “This bike here isn't so great, and it doesn't run, but if you can get it started you can have it,” and sure enough he did. He could build anything from a barn and horse stalls to a Southern Mansion dollhouse, and he was constantly rigging things to try and make them work better. He could take a chain link fence and two-by-fours, attach it to the back of his tractor and use it to smooth out the ground in the garden. There was nothing he couldn’t fix.
1984
He was so gentle-with people, with animals, with children. My whole life I’ve heard such great stories about my mom, Judi, Patti and Scott growing up on the farm. Anything anybody wanted, Poppy tried his best to get it - horses, iguanas, guinea pigs, rabbits, chickens, and even a pony on Christmas morning. He was spontaneous. He wasn't the type to plan things ahead, and you weren't often let in on his thought process, but he always had something in store for you. One spring my mom had been sponsored to walk in a marathon in Kendall Park with her girlfriend, but when she woke her dad up the morning of the race so he could drive her there, he said, “You wanna go get a goat?” Nanni said, “Stan! You can't go get a goat, she has to run in this race!” But my mom had been asking for a goat for months and was always told no, so when he offered it that morning she said screw the marathon and they drove out to Englishtown and came home with a baby goat named Daisy in the back of the station wagon. There was a baseball diamond in the back of my grandparent's farm, and Poppy would get together with his friends from Public Service to play ball in the summertime. As Daisy got older she grew friskier. She'd run up on to one of the benches that was out there, then fling herself off it and do cartwheels in the air. Poppy thought this was the greatest thing, so from then on whenever he would say, “Kath, go get the goat”, people would snicker under their breath, knowing what was about to happen. He would pick out a friend or neighbor who didn't know what Daisy was capable of doing, and tell him to get down on the ground on all fours, then my mom would point at the victim and Daisy would go running over, jump up on his back, do a little dance, and then cartwheel off while the poor guy freaked out and everyone else looked on and laughed.
In earlier years, when they lived in the suburbs on Hardenberg Lane, Patti had a pony named Fury that was kept on a farm nearby, and one day Poppy surprised her by bringing the horse to the house and letting her keep it in the backyard out in the dog run for a few days, where they'd hear it's hooves clip-clopping on the concrete all night. It was thoughtful little things like this that Poppy was notorious for, even if they drove Nanni crazy.
Another time my mom saw a yellow-headed macaw for sale in the newspaper for $400. She knew it was too expensive, but she begged her parents to please just take her to go see it, she only wanted to look at it. They went to take a look, warning her that they were only looking. The bird was really friendly, and would sing and dance on it's stick, but Nanni said it was just too much money and they had to leave. Halfway back to the car Poppy stopped in his tracks and said, “Let's go ask them if they'll take $325.” He was definitely an animal lover. He taught my mom how to finger train birds, how to hand feed them and raise them, and was always whistling to the bird and teaching it songs. In Florida he would sit outside on his driveway and the sandhill cranes that wandered around his development would come right up to him and take bread straight out of his hand. When I was younger, I remember Poppy training his cockatiel, Lucie, to do the “Tiger trick”, which meant sticking her entire head into his mouth, while my grandma looked on and screamed that the bird was going to die of smoke inhalation.
Every Father’s Day I see a quote on a greeting card that says, “My father didn’t tell me how to live. He lived, and let me watch him do it.” My grandfather was the epitome of that phrase. He didn’t explain to me how to build a fence, he'd ask me to sit outside with him so I could watch, and then eventually hand me a hammer and a drill and tell me to try it for myself. He didn’t sit around and tell me stories about his fishing days, he took me out to the ocean, placed the pole in my hands and then talked me through it as I was doing it. He let me and my cousins drive his ride-on lawnmower as soon as we were big enough to reach the pedals. He sat me at the steering wheel of his boat when I was eight-years old and said, “Here, you drive.” Boating and canoeing, and fishing and crabbing were his specialties. He knew everything about how to tie up the bait, how to use a hand line, how to saw the heads off the fish (or how to get my little cousins to do it for him.) He would regularly wake his kids up at four in the morning to take them crabbing, and later he would wake me and my cousin Chrissy at that same early hour to take us out on the rowboat. It was unbelievable the amount of knowledge my grandfather had, about everything, and how adept he was at passing it down to his children and grandchildren. He knew that children learn by example, but also learn by doing. He gave me the keys to his car when I was fifteen and didn't even have a learner's permit yet and told me to take it for a spin around the block. So many things could have gone wrong with any of those scenarios. I watch old home videos and am amazed one of us didn't crash the lawnmower into the fence or drive the boat up an embankment. But Poppy didn't care about any of those possibilities. On some level he knew that that wasn't what mattered. It was more important that we were having fun, and learning as we went. And as a result, we were always safe in his hands.
2009
Poppy was always a man of few words, and in recent years he spoke less and less, yet I could sit with him in complete silence and feel totally at ease. I was never afraid to reach out to him, because I knew he’d always take my hand in his. He never scolded me, he never rejected me, he never refused anyone anything. In his quiet, unassuming way, he was just there for you. And on the rare occasion when he did talk to you about something serious, you LISTENED. Nanni used to tell me that what she loved most about Poppy was that she could tell him anything, and how he was such a good listener and problem solver that she always felt better after talking to him. He may have been a quiet man, but he didn’t need to say much. You KNEW how much he loved you by his actions. I can’t count how many times I mentioned in passing that I was kind of hungry, and suddenly a jelly pancake would appear before me without him ever saying he was going to go cook it. Sometimes I would wake up and my car would be missing, because Poppy had decided it was time to take it in for an oil change and a tune-up. Once when I was younger I saw him walk out the door while I was talking to my grandmother about how no one had ever given me flowers, and when he came home he had a rose for me, and a half dozen for her.
He was happy. He wasn’t the type of man to state it out loud, but you could see it in the way he was always whistling some tune from his childhood, singing “Que Sera, Sera” or “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane”. At church he usually sat quietly at Nanni’s side for the majority of mass, but when it came time to join hands and sing the “Our Father”, he’d open his mouth and belt out singing in a voice so clear and so beautiful that it would literally give me chills-especially the part that says “Thy will be done.” I remember how excited he would get when there was going to be a space shuttle launching off the coast of Cape Canaveral, because we’d be able to see it from his backyard in Port St. Lucie. He was especially excited the time we were able to watch it through the telescope Uncle Scott had bought for him, clearer than ever before. I like to picture him now in Heaven, flying planes or manning space shuttles-something he was never able to do while he was here, but always dreamed of, because in Heaven there are no earthly handicaps.
With his passing, a circle of life has been completed, and in some ways an era has ended. Judi, Patti, Kathleen and Scott have lost both their parents. My sister and brothers, my cousins and I, have lost both our grandparents. Yet all around me every day I see families falling apart and losing touch for reasons much smaller, and much less final, than death, so when I look at our family, and see the connection that exists between all of us no matter how often we see each other, or how far away we live, I feel so blessed. Nanni and Poppy were responsible for not only creating, but passing on, a lifetime of acceptance and unconditional love, and as long as we keep their faith and their memories alive, that legacy will never have an end.
When we close the casket tomorrow, it may be the last time we're seeing Poppy for a while, but it won't be the last time he sees us. Because “Those who live in the Lord NEVER see each other for the last time.”
2/9/1932 - 1/22/2013
My heart is at ease today as we gather together to remember the life of my grandfather, Stanley Malinowski, because I know he is finally at peace. At the moment of his passing, for as sad as I was, I also felt relieved. I truly felt as though a great weight had been lifted. We all know how he has spent the last three years suffering from the loss of his wife, but the two tears in his eyes as he took his final breath let me know that he was seeing the love of his life, my grandmother Carolyn, again at last.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. We live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” 2 Corinthians 4:16-15:8
When a man has lived a life full of so much love and respect, it can be hard to encapsulate the many ways in which my he was amazing. He simply WAS. I struggled a little at first writing his eulogy, because Poppy was always the man behind the scenes, literally the man behind the camera or video camera. How do you condense down into a couple of minutes a man who did everything for me? For all his children and grandchildren? Poppy was so giving, and so selfless. He always knew the right course of action, practically and morally, and he did what needed to be done, as a father, a husband, a grandfather, a brother, an uncle-he accepted without question the path God laid before him, and he never complained. Born at home in South Amboy, the third of six children, he dreamed of being a pilot but instead he dropped out of school at Sacred Heart when he was just 14 years old so he could go to work at a labeling factory and help earn money to support the family.
When he was 18 he saw my grandmother playing handball in front of his house and said to his friends, “That’s her! That’s the girl I always wanted to meet!” He had seen her months before, but never had the courage to approach her until that day. For their first date, he took her to Stewart’s Hot Dog Stand in Morgan, and later when they went for a walk he leaned against an oak tree, took her in his arms and kissed her, and for the next 56 years his loyalty and devotion to her did not waver.
At age 19, without any formal training or education whatsoever, Poppy began what would turn out to be a lifelong career at Public Service, the company he stayed with for 36 years. He married Nanni when he was 22, they honeymooned in Miami, and then returned to New Jersey to start the family they both wanted. Poppy wanted as many kids as possible but they stopped at four after having Judi, Patti, Kathleen and Scott. In addition to working for PSE&G, it was not uncommon for Poppy to have a second, and sometimes a third job, which took time away from his wife and children, but also provided the support and sense of security that a growing family needs.
Poppy was such a hard worker, and he had the most capable hands. He was so strong, and so talented. He was so personable that he made friends everywhere he went or at any job he worked. He got to know the owner of a minibike place, and when Patti said she wanted one the guy told Poppy, “This bike here isn't so great, and it doesn't run, but if you can get it started you can have it,” and sure enough he did. He could build anything from a barn and horse stalls to a Southern Mansion dollhouse, and he was constantly rigging things to try and make them work better. He could take a chain link fence and two-by-fours, attach it to the back of his tractor and use it to smooth out the ground in the garden. There was nothing he couldn’t fix.
1984
He was so gentle-with people, with animals, with children. My whole life I’ve heard such great stories about my mom, Judi, Patti and Scott growing up on the farm. Anything anybody wanted, Poppy tried his best to get it - horses, iguanas, guinea pigs, rabbits, chickens, and even a pony on Christmas morning. He was spontaneous. He wasn't the type to plan things ahead, and you weren't often let in on his thought process, but he always had something in store for you. One spring my mom had been sponsored to walk in a marathon in Kendall Park with her girlfriend, but when she woke her dad up the morning of the race so he could drive her there, he said, “You wanna go get a goat?” Nanni said, “Stan! You can't go get a goat, she has to run in this race!” But my mom had been asking for a goat for months and was always told no, so when he offered it that morning she said screw the marathon and they drove out to Englishtown and came home with a baby goat named Daisy in the back of the station wagon. There was a baseball diamond in the back of my grandparent's farm, and Poppy would get together with his friends from Public Service to play ball in the summertime. As Daisy got older she grew friskier. She'd run up on to one of the benches that was out there, then fling herself off it and do cartwheels in the air. Poppy thought this was the greatest thing, so from then on whenever he would say, “Kath, go get the goat”, people would snicker under their breath, knowing what was about to happen. He would pick out a friend or neighbor who didn't know what Daisy was capable of doing, and tell him to get down on the ground on all fours, then my mom would point at the victim and Daisy would go running over, jump up on his back, do a little dance, and then cartwheel off while the poor guy freaked out and everyone else looked on and laughed.
In earlier years, when they lived in the suburbs on Hardenberg Lane, Patti had a pony named Fury that was kept on a farm nearby, and one day Poppy surprised her by bringing the horse to the house and letting her keep it in the backyard out in the dog run for a few days, where they'd hear it's hooves clip-clopping on the concrete all night. It was thoughtful little things like this that Poppy was notorious for, even if they drove Nanni crazy.
Another time my mom saw a yellow-headed macaw for sale in the newspaper for $400. She knew it was too expensive, but she begged her parents to please just take her to go see it, she only wanted to look at it. They went to take a look, warning her that they were only looking. The bird was really friendly, and would sing and dance on it's stick, but Nanni said it was just too much money and they had to leave. Halfway back to the car Poppy stopped in his tracks and said, “Let's go ask them if they'll take $325.” He was definitely an animal lover. He taught my mom how to finger train birds, how to hand feed them and raise them, and was always whistling to the bird and teaching it songs. In Florida he would sit outside on his driveway and the sandhill cranes that wandered around his development would come right up to him and take bread straight out of his hand. When I was younger, I remember Poppy training his cockatiel, Lucie, to do the “Tiger trick”, which meant sticking her entire head into his mouth, while my grandma looked on and screamed that the bird was going to die of smoke inhalation.
Every Father’s Day I see a quote on a greeting card that says, “My father didn’t tell me how to live. He lived, and let me watch him do it.” My grandfather was the epitome of that phrase. He didn’t explain to me how to build a fence, he'd ask me to sit outside with him so I could watch, and then eventually hand me a hammer and a drill and tell me to try it for myself. He didn’t sit around and tell me stories about his fishing days, he took me out to the ocean, placed the pole in my hands and then talked me through it as I was doing it. He let me and my cousins drive his ride-on lawnmower as soon as we were big enough to reach the pedals. He sat me at the steering wheel of his boat when I was eight-years old and said, “Here, you drive.” Boating and canoeing, and fishing and crabbing were his specialties. He knew everything about how to tie up the bait, how to use a hand line, how to saw the heads off the fish (or how to get my little cousins to do it for him.) He would regularly wake his kids up at four in the morning to take them crabbing, and later he would wake me and my cousin Chrissy at that same early hour to take us out on the rowboat. It was unbelievable the amount of knowledge my grandfather had, about everything, and how adept he was at passing it down to his children and grandchildren. He knew that children learn by example, but also learn by doing. He gave me the keys to his car when I was fifteen and didn't even have a learner's permit yet and told me to take it for a spin around the block. So many things could have gone wrong with any of those scenarios. I watch old home videos and am amazed one of us didn't crash the lawnmower into the fence or drive the boat up an embankment. But Poppy didn't care about any of those possibilities. On some level he knew that that wasn't what mattered. It was more important that we were having fun, and learning as we went. And as a result, we were always safe in his hands.
2009
Poppy was always a man of few words, and in recent years he spoke less and less, yet I could sit with him in complete silence and feel totally at ease. I was never afraid to reach out to him, because I knew he’d always take my hand in his. He never scolded me, he never rejected me, he never refused anyone anything. In his quiet, unassuming way, he was just there for you. And on the rare occasion when he did talk to you about something serious, you LISTENED. Nanni used to tell me that what she loved most about Poppy was that she could tell him anything, and how he was such a good listener and problem solver that she always felt better after talking to him. He may have been a quiet man, but he didn’t need to say much. You KNEW how much he loved you by his actions. I can’t count how many times I mentioned in passing that I was kind of hungry, and suddenly a jelly pancake would appear before me without him ever saying he was going to go cook it. Sometimes I would wake up and my car would be missing, because Poppy had decided it was time to take it in for an oil change and a tune-up. Once when I was younger I saw him walk out the door while I was talking to my grandmother about how no one had ever given me flowers, and when he came home he had a rose for me, and a half dozen for her.
He was happy. He wasn’t the type of man to state it out loud, but you could see it in the way he was always whistling some tune from his childhood, singing “Que Sera, Sera” or “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane”. At church he usually sat quietly at Nanni’s side for the majority of mass, but when it came time to join hands and sing the “Our Father”, he’d open his mouth and belt out singing in a voice so clear and so beautiful that it would literally give me chills-especially the part that says “Thy will be done.” I remember how excited he would get when there was going to be a space shuttle launching off the coast of Cape Canaveral, because we’d be able to see it from his backyard in Port St. Lucie. He was especially excited the time we were able to watch it through the telescope Uncle Scott had bought for him, clearer than ever before. I like to picture him now in Heaven, flying planes or manning space shuttles-something he was never able to do while he was here, but always dreamed of, because in Heaven there are no earthly handicaps.
With his passing, a circle of life has been completed, and in some ways an era has ended. Judi, Patti, Kathleen and Scott have lost both their parents. My sister and brothers, my cousins and I, have lost both our grandparents. Yet all around me every day I see families falling apart and losing touch for reasons much smaller, and much less final, than death, so when I look at our family, and see the connection that exists between all of us no matter how often we see each other, or how far away we live, I feel so blessed. Nanni and Poppy were responsible for not only creating, but passing on, a lifetime of acceptance and unconditional love, and as long as we keep their faith and their memories alive, that legacy will never have an end.
When we close the casket tomorrow, it may be the last time we're seeing Poppy for a while, but it won't be the last time he sees us. Because “Those who live in the Lord NEVER see each other for the last time.”