"One of the most beautiful cities in the world"

[This is the eulogy I read at Dad's memorial in SF. It is about half the same as my Seattle eulogy.]

Thank you all so much for being here today to honor and remember my father, Stephen Joseph Scherr. He was born in 1940 in Washington DC and grew up in Baltimore. After two years of college and military service, in 1965 he moved here, to San Francisco, joining his sister Jes and his parents who had moved here a few years before. He married my mother Jean in 1969. They wore paisley pants in a little cottage on Telegraph Hill and I have the pictures to prove it. He was not a hippie, he was a “hippie sympathizer,” in his words (a joke I only got recently). I was born in 1971, and soon after that my parents moved to the Richmond District, where I grew up, and where my father lived until he moved in with us in January, just after his diagnosis.

He loved San Francisco. Once when I was admiring a view of the Golden Gate Bridge he said, “Your mother and I had the good taste to raise you in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.” They raised me to enjoy the advantages of living here: thanks to them I spent my childhood in Golden Gate Park, my adolescence walking from one side of the city to the other with my friends (because they wisely declined to let me drive the car), and much of high school at the Exploratorium, which eventually shaped my career in physics.

I was very aware of my father’s professional life and very much inspired by it. As most of you know, he defended some clients that non-lawyers might find distressing. My grandmother (his mother) did not see how he could stomach representing them. But I learned from him that for the American judicial system to work, everyone needs the best representation they can receive. I saw that he loved representing the underdog, being the underdog, helping to keep the system honest. I learned that ideally, the legal system protects us all from our own knee-jerk condemnations in favor of a more deliberate, more rational process – a perspective that serves me well in the sciences. My father was well aware that the system is flawed; his lifelong opposition to the death penalty was based in his knowledge that the system is racist, among other problems. But on the whole he respected social systems, and set an example of working to help us all live up to our ideals. He also set an example to me as someone who loved his work: he was grateful to have a job he enjoyed and was good at, and to have the opportunity to help individual people who needed it.

Everyone who knew my father knew him to be reliable. This might make him sound boring, and to be honest he was extremely predictable: he wore the same clothes for decades, ate the same foods, wore the same style glasses, drove the same car. More importantly, though, he was reliable in the sense that he kept commitments he made to other people. He generously invited people to rely on him, and then used his knowledge and resources to do what he said he would do. Whether showing up at the agreed time and place, supporting me through college, mentoring a junior colleague, or defending the accused, everyone knew that he would be there and live up to his word. He was solid.

His final illness was bewildering to him. It was completely unexpected, and its progress was so rapid. Every week brought new symptoms, new procedures. We never adjusted. But we were side by side every step of the way. During his illness we were able to bring him to live with us and take the best possible care of him. He and I made every decision together and were constant companions for his last two months, along with my husband Dale and our two kids, Jordan and Aaron, ages 11 and 8. Along with his sister Jes and sister-in-law Deena, we gave each other every kind of love and support and emotional safety that a family can give. You all helped too: some of you came to visit, and many others sent toasts, which we read aloud to him among family, laughing and crying and learning what he has meant to people. I will miss my father more than I can say; but I am grateful to have spent those last few weeks close to him, adding to a lifetime of warm memories.

Thank you all again so much for being here.