On October 29, 2008 I received a call informing me that the man I had always admired and regarded as my hero had succombed to a battle with a malignant brain tumor.
This man was none other than my oldest brother, Larry Cofield. He was a man among men and one that can never be replaced. Although his passing was not a surprise it still hurt nonetheless.
I was honored to have the opportunity to speak at his funeral. I have posted the eulogy below.
Thanks for spending the time here to read it and watch the slide show:
I’m not much for talking on the telephone and from what I can gather, neither was Larry. Since he moved to Texas quite a few years ago we haven’t talked to each other a whole lot. But, thanks to email we have stayed in contact with each other over the years and exchanged news and pictures so we sort of knew what was going on with each other.
Prior to that we had a lot of great times together.
Larry is several years older than me so there is not much I remember of his early years. The earliest memory that I have of him is one time before I was even old enough to start grade school. Maxine (my sister) and I were chasing him around the yard because we saw him eating a candy bar. He was playing along with us because he could have obviously ran away from us and hid. But instead he let us tackle him and we were all rolling around on the ground telling him to let us have a bite of the candy bar. He was laughing and eating the candy bar while trying to hide the remaining part of the candy bar so that we couldn’t see it. He would laugh and say that it wasn’t candy it was chewing tobacco and would spit some of the juice out on the ground. Sure enough, it looked like tobacco juice, but we knew it was candy. That’s all I remember of that story except for the fact that we never got any of the candy bar.
I remember he always seemed to work so hard when we were kids. We were raised on a farm and it seems that until us other kids got big enough to help out that he had to do everything.
I remember him being on the track team when he was in high school because he ran all the time.
I remember the day he won two rifles when he was in high school for selling magazines or something. He actually carried the guns around the school and brought them home on the school bus. My, how things change!
I remember him being an avid reader. We didn’t have a TV in our house until he was in high school so I guess reading became his form of entertainment. I mean, he used to have hundreds, if not thousands of books. Science fiction seemed to be his favorite. But then, he wouldn’t turn down a good western either.
I remember the day we took him to Atlanta to catch his flight to Vietnam the first time. That was a pretty rough day. I was only a kid at the time, but I remember how my mom cried as she watched him leave. But what I remember the most about that day was seeing the solemn expression on my dad’s face as we were walking out of the airport. That’s when I realized that he was the only one in the group who had a clue about what Larry was about to experience because he was a combat veteran himself.
But then I remember the excitement of waiting for the mail to arrive and hoping that I would have a letter from him. It was always a red letter day when I would get one, and sometimes they would even include pictures.
I remember us meeting him at the airport when he returned from Vietnam. Man, you talk about a good day, that was one of ‘em!
While he was away, I had started wearing glasses. I got black plastic frames because that is what kind he was wearing when he left. I thought he would think how cool it would be when he got off that plane and saw that we were wearing the same kind of glasses. Wouldn’t you know it, he had gotten wire frames while he was over there and I was left standing there with those dorky black frames while he had already advanced into the space age.
I remember while he was back at home that one day I had forgotten my glasses when I left for school. I had to call home and get him to bring them to me. Man, you could hear him getting into that Triumph motorcycle as he got close to the school. Back then there weren’t a lot of scooters in that part of the world, so everyone knew who it was when they heard it. He came and knocked on the classroom door and brought those glasses to me. Let me tell ya’, I knew that everyone there knew that that was my big brother who had just gotten back from Vietnam, was in the Army, and drove a loud motorcycle. And if that wasn’t enough, the teacher liked his shirt and asked me where he had bought it. I told him, “Australia” like that was no big thing. And if that wasn’t enough, he had a mustache, too. It was a proud day for a little small town sixth grader.
I remember one year when he was still in the Army that he came home for Christmas and we decided to go bird hunting. I don’t know if it was against the law, is against the law, or whatever, but the birds we were hunting were robins and I’m here to proclaim that we found them. And when we found them, we forevermore worked on them. Even if it had been legal to shoot them, I’m quite sure that we exceeded the bag limit no matter what it was. We did that with those two .22 caliber rifles he had won in high school.
I remember rat killings in the corn crib. Our crib was divided into three big sections in the front with a door going into each section. Around on the side of the crib we had what we called the feed room. It was there that we kept the bags of pellets, shorts and bottles of worm medicine. But when we decided to have a rat killing we would go to town and get a couple of boxes of rat shot and get our flashlights up against the side of those rifle barrels and snatch those doors open at the same time and start shining those lights all along the rafters and ceiling joists and propel many a rat to their eternal destiny. I am convinced that rats have never been introduced to the concept of waving a white flag to surrender because if they had there would have been white flags everywhere because they never stood a chance.
I remember when he decided to try his hand at commercial fishing. I would go with him sometimes and help him run his slat boxes. A good while went by before we really did any good with it, but one time we were pulling up on one of the boxes, and it popped to the surface before we could even get to it. We got excited because we had always heard that if a box has a bunch of fish in it that it would do that. Whoever told us that definitely knew what they were talking about. We got that box in the boat and opened it and I didn’t think catfish would ever stop falling out of that thing. We were all excited and laughing and falling all over ourselves and flopping around in the bottom of the boat worse than the fish were. That was a glorious time!
I remember one time when he was “between jobs” he asked me if I wanted to go deer hunting with him one night. I said sure. So we snuck around behind some other folks’ property and got set up. He explained to me that since we were night hunting anyway and he needed some groceries that I need not be concerned with differentiating between bucks and does. I guess when you’re hungry there are really only two deer seasons and that would be salt and black pepper. But we finally got tired of sitting around and went home without killing anything so I guess we didn’t really do anything wrong after all, huh?
I remember trapping with him one year. We caught, killed and skinned coons, possums, foxes, beavers and wildcats until I didn’t care if I ever saw another one of any of those varmints again. But we had a grand time doing it and made some pretty good money at it too.
I remember him being an expert cabinet maker and furniture maker and woodworker. I always enjoyed working around him when he was building stuff. I’ve become quite an accomplished woodworker over the years myself and I attribute much of the knowledge I have in that area to things I learned while helping him in his shop.
And I could go on and on, but that wouldn’t be fair to you folks. But I remember a more recent event that I must share. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina ripped through our part of the country and dumped four feet of water in our house which essentially wiped us out. The entire interior of the house had to be rebuilt. In fact it isn’t finished yet. Larry and Debra wired a huge sum of money to us that, quite frankly, I don’t know how we would have made it without it. Not long after that I was laying on an air mattress trying to sleep when I was awakened sometime after 1 A.M. to bright lights flashing in front of the house. This was strange since all the electricity was still out in that part of the world. Well, the cops had been following Larry and Debra since they had gotten into town and when they stopped in front of our house, they showered down on them. I went to the front door and one of the cops was escorting Larry to the house to verify the story he had told him about being my brother. Of course I was as glad to see him as you can imagine so I naturally told the cop, “Officer, I have never seen this man before.” Not really, I told them everything was cool, and that I had been expecting them to arrive.
He was pulling a trailer with a load of sheetrock about a mile high. He had all the stuff I needed to hang it. He had gas for my generator. I don’t even remember all the stuff he brought. Of all the blessings I’ve received in my life, that one is on the top of the list. Debra even left her car with us for months because ours was destroyed by the saltwater.
But I couldn’t possibly tell all of this without backing up and mentioning another big moment in his life. I remember Larry telling us about how when he was in Vietnam that he was getting hordes of letters from a bunch of kids in Texas. It turns out that he was serving in Vietnam with a school teacher from out here who had gotten some of his students to be pen pals with his fellow servicemen. After he returned home I guess they stopped writing to him. Well almost.
He kept getting letters from one of the students.
I remember him telling our mom that he was going to ride out to Texas to see who that “little ole girl” was that kept on writing him. So he fired up his scooter and away he went. He met the little ole girl and her family and sometime later they travelled to Alabama to meet us. They didn’t get to our house as early as Larry expected them to, so he took off on his scooter looking for them. He didn’t find them that night because they had already pulled over and set up their pop-up camper in a little town called Grove Hill, AL. The next morning, bright and early, he took off again looking for them. He parked his scooter at the bridge that crosses the Alabama River at Claiborne on HWY 84. If I remember the story correctly he was sitting on the bridge waiting for them and flagged them down when he saw them. He put that little ole girl on that motorcycle and brought her to our house with the rest of her family following.
As it turns out, that little ole girl turned out to be much more than that. In fact she is here today. In fact she’s been by his side almost constantly since then, and that was over thirty-five years ago.
She is my sister-in-law now and as far as I’m concerned will always be my sister-in-law. I have two fine nephews and a fine great nephew because of those never-ending letters from Texas. Thank you Debra for loving and supporting and believing in my big brother all these years.
I am glad that he served as it says in 1 Timothy 4:10, the living God who is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe. I am thankful that he served the second Adam, Christ, for in the first Adam all die, but in the second Adam, Christ, all will be made alive. I believe that he is now a part of the great cloud of witnesses that is mentioned in the Bible. I also believe that as the Bible states, we are surrounded by that great cloud of witnesses. He may be closer to us now that we think.
I will never forget Larry Cofield. He will always be alive in my memory and my love for him will never diminish. I will always remember my brother as a man who loved his family more than he loved himself or more than he loved life itself. I was rooting for him to win this battle because I have never seen him lose anything before. Considering things on the grand scale, I think it is safe to say that I still haven’t seen him lose because ultimately he has won the last battle he will ever have to fight!
