Remembering Holden T. Doane

It is a blessed and wonderful thing, for a relative to inspire in one both love and awe. And I loved and awed my grandfather, Holden.

Influences and echoes can come from the strangest of places, but not at all strange in this case - Papa was a man who loved deeply. He respected and cherished the land he worked and lived on. The farm house at Sunday Brook that he and Nana made was always warm, always welcoming - to his children and later to his grandchildren, to neighbours, to fellow churchgoers, to hired hands, to strangers - and the love between him and Nana was the heart of that house. He was a mainstay of the Bakersfield community; he didn’t say much, but those words he did speak were unfailingly kind. To me, on those rare but cherished occasions when I got to visit him and see him and speak with him, he always showed to me - again, never so much in so many words - his faith, his decency, his strength, his perserverence, his peaceableness, his industry, his hospitality and caretaking of all that was entrusted to him.

That respect in me that I have for things stable and durable, for things proven by time and care, for stories and ties of blood that nothing on earth can replace - that I imbibed from many places, but chief among them, I learned that respect from Papa, and the family and the home that he built. I am thankful that I knew him when I became an adult, and could appreciate his wisdom.

In a blessed falling asleep, grant, O Lord, eternal rest unto Thy departed servant Holden, and make his memory to be eternal!