Eulogy for Mike deGruy
Frank deGruy
Sunday, February 12, 2012

You've seen these little gray wristbands around? WWMD? What Would Mike Do? Max's idea. Brilliant. The point for me is that Mike wasn't here just to entertain us, which he did, or educate us, which he did, or inspire us, which he did, or to love us, which he also did, but to get inside us and change us—to make us behave differently. Mike left better people in his wake; he actually left the world a better place. Thinking about Mike's life can be a meditation on making the world funnier and more intelligible and kinder and otherwise better. Thank you, Max, for this lovely idea. What I have to say is inspired by you.

I agree with Freud that at the end of a life, there are only two things that matter: love and work, and Mike played them both as long suits, tangled up together. Mike's first love in this world was for his Mimi and his Max and his Frances. Mimi completed him and made him better. As much as Mike was out there in the world, as well as he loved all of you, he reserved the best for Mimi, and he made no bones about how indispensible she was to his joy and stability. Ideas erupted from Mike that Mimi strained through the filter of good judgment and common sense to keep him from doing something really stupid; his color and her substance; her vessel for his engine. They had a two-decade run, and they were just getting started. Mimi lost Mike too soon. Oh, Mimi. And boy, did he luck out with her family. The Armstrongs were his idea (and mine too) of a class act; I never heard a single negative word about any of them. I'm telling you the truth. Only how lucky he was, and how much he loved them.

If Mimi completed Mike, Max and Frances expanded him, dilated him. Each inherited different strands from his character, and each will pull those threads into a fabric of their own making, different from his and in many ways better. Neither will be Mike. He knew this and liked it. I agree with him; these are two seriously beautiful children, and it thrills me to see my brother shining out from them in such unexpected ways. Alchemy.

Mike was born the third of four boys to my momma, Katherine, who is here with my beautiful cousin Alix today. My brothers Glenn and Ken are also here. Frank, Glenn, Mike, Ken. She had four of us in five years. Oh, God. We were bad. And my father didn't help matters. People have been extending their condolences to my mother for years. We are going to have a tough time with this; Mike was our pride and joy, and held a central place in our family. Not only did he serve as the glue, keeping us all in touch with each other, we couldn't wait for him to come home and tell us what he had done this time. He made our family exciting.

All the rest of you: you're part of something extraordinary. Mike was like a magnet who, in passing across each of you, attracted you not only to himself but to each other. You've been magnetized! For life! Jay Ison is here from Mobile. Jay and Mike have been fast friends for fifty-five years. How many solid, close, fifty-five year old friendships do you have? Mike had a lot of them. He wouldn't let you go! He had friends everywhere. I'll wager most of you have said at some time, "What a great guy!" You've got outrageous stories about him, and he had funny stories about you. His enthusiasm! His excitement! His sense of wonder! Terry Ellis described Mike as a human exclamation mark.

Mike would go to the ends of the earth, the bottom of the ocean, to see what he could see, and when he saw it he was amazed. But here's the thing: half of it was the adventure of going, and half of it was so he could come back and tell us about it. He wanted to tell you, personally and particularly, about some incredible thing that he had learned. He knit us together with his adventures and his stories. He made us a community, and he made our communities closer and better. And that is a very fine definition of love. He didn't just wrap that around us and spin that between us, he infected us with the inexpressible sweetness and comfort of knowing one another and sharing one another, and now it is on us to remember this and to live like this ourselves. Go from here and reach out to your wife, your mother, your brother, your child, your neighbor, your friend; reach out in playfulness and laughter and fun and serious intimacy. Do it for Mike, for each other, for the world.

Love and work. What about Mike's work? How did he get like this? It's a long and complicated story; I'll tell you about just one element: courage. Courage is not the absence of fear. It's acting in the face of fear. Mike had fear, just like you and me; he just didn't let his fear back him away. But he wasn't always like that. I clearly remember an inflection point when he was nine or ten years old. We four deGruy boys were springboard divers back in those days, and it emerged pretty early on that Mike was likely to be the best of us all, except for one problem. Mike was a chicken. I remember a conversation with my dad, who coached us back then, about what a problem it was that Mike was scared to try new dives. He was a chicken. This went on for maybe two summers, then, when the pool opened the next year, Mike had evidently made a decision, because he went out to the pool and got on the board and tried one new dive after another. If he missed and landed flat on his back, well, he got back up there and did it again. He went from being scared of difficult new dives to trying them and perfecting them without hesitation. Now let's get clear about this. Mike definitely did risky things, if the payoff was high, but he emphatically did not take foolish risks; he calculated the risk, and if it factored out right, he went ahead, despite his fear. Despite his fear. As a nine-year-old child he decided to be like that, he began acting in the face of his fear, and his life was greatly enlarged. And so was mine. I learned this from Mike; he changed me in this way, and my life and my world got bigger and better. Digest this. Become like this. Be like Mike in this, and your life will enlarge, and you will be as thankful as I for this exquisite life lesson.

Oh, I would love to tell you about how Mike used his humor to underscore his sense of amazement, to ward off pain, to deflate self-importance, to make connections. I would love to tell you about his dogged, stubborn persistence, and the breakthroughs that that won him, but I would rather use my last minutes to tell you about the threshold he had approached in the last months of his life, the breakthrough that was about to happen. Mike loved this natural world; he fed on the scientist's delight in discovery, and the raconteur's pleasure in the telling; his amazement receptors were fired by the bizarre and beautiful forms that life took, and especially by the fragile interdependence of life with life. This depends on that; hurt one, hurt the other. Mike understood as well as the next good biologist the long tail of unintended consequences—that there were consequences and costs to our fishing and killing and taking and drilling; consequences that went far beyond simple depletion. By blindly helping ourselves to this earth's abundance, we could actually do ourselves in. When Mike's beloved Gulf of Mexico was fouled a few years ago, he rushed down there to see and show what had happened. What he discovered was far more dangerous and terrible than he anticipated. He couldn't see and he couldn't show. He was denied access. A corporation and a government colluded in a campaign of disinformation, and blocked access to the disaster they had created. Life was dying, and we were not permitted to know. Mike's colleagues, the scientists who would ordinarily turn their talents to learning about it, had been bought off—they were paid to not learn, to not tell. He couldn't penetrate this black wall of denial and deceit and silence. This produced in Mike an incandescent rage, and he resolved to break this wall and not let this happen to our planet and our people. His consciousness grew as he probed for the points of weakness, where light could shine in and where what we were doing could be seen and shown. James Cameron recently referred to Mike as a warrior. A perfect label for this transformed Mike. In this last year, he was retooling, launching a new campaign of revelation and wonder and discovery—this time in the face of formidable resistance from those who would turn the earth's beauty into power.

This was interrupted by a helicopter crash. To me, this is one of the supreme tragedies of Mike's untimely death. He was on the threshold of helping us see more clearly how to organize ourselves to protect this blooming, buzzing, fragile, precious web of life. So you here, take up this last great cause, and let his warrior spirit fortify you and embolden you. Speak the truth despite your fear. Love this life. Love one another, and protect this place of our dwelling. Go from here inspired by this warrior's strength. Mike is alive inside you. Make something of it.