Speech about my grandfather

These two photos were taken in New York City, the last at the Empire State Building.

To put my grandfather’s health into perspective, he was living alone in an apartment in a senior’s complex in east Vancouver from about 1990 to 2011. At the age of 97 it was clear he wasn’t fit to live on his own and was even hospitalized. Members of my family flew from across the continent thinking those were his last days, but he recovered and was transferred to an assisted living home until he moved to the facility where he finally passed away in 2014. While packing up his belongings, my aunt found a file of documents including my grandfather’s time in the army and air force, his flight training, logs, and even hand-typed and written letters to and from government officials who sent him abroad to San Francisco to study mechanics and piloting.

In my opinion, these were some of the most interesting parts of my grandfather’s story we included as they pieced together what he went through during that time. Each document also added to the page count!

Stage 2: Compilation

Using the interview transcription, I put together the text of my grandfather’s story and ran that by my fellow “editors.” My uncle said that it would be nice to include anecdotes from family members to give a more holistic perspective of who my grandfather was, aside from the marriage-kids-army-career-immigration milestones he passed in the Philippines and Canada. So I collected anecdotes from my sister, dad, aunts and uncles, family friends, and cousins. Some of these were Skype calls and voice recordings that I transcribed, since not everyone was comfortable with writing and sending by email. One of my uncles—who arguably has the best recollection of and most number of stories about my family—neglected to send me anything. But because I had a voice recording app on my phone, I stole one of the stories he told at the dinner table one day, and included that.

Thanks to my half-cousin who lives in Australia, I received a scanned letter from my half-aunt in the Philippines, who I’ve never met. It was really nice to be able to add her story and photos of my grandfather’s descendants on her side of the family.

Once we had the text and anecdotes, my sister and I planned a general layout of photos and documents (not easy to do, as it was hard to tell the year when many of the photos were taken). Then we had to find someone who could create the interior of the book for us.

Stage 3: Design

So if I had the formatting skills I have now, we would have saved some money (and time). But then, I believed we needed the help of a graphic designer, so my sister paid $300 to a colleague with these skills, who we’d met in the self-development group we were all in.

I gave her the Word file of the text, renamed all the file names of the documents and photos, and sent her some guidelines about where the images should go. She did a great job of determining how many photos would fit on a page and recommended some of the really nice vertical photos get their own page.

The cover I envisioned for this book was really simple, and inspired by a book of poems called Execution Poems, written by my former university professor, Canadian poet George Elliott Clarke. It’s a textured black cover with engraving for the title (no colour). But instead of engraving I thought it would be cool to have the title in gold or silver (I’m more of a silver person).

My cousin’s partner, Adele Zanni, is a renowned artist, and volunteered to do two family trees for the book. Our designer had to put my family’s names in the leaves, and then Adele wrote them in before physically delivering the poster-size artwork at my grandfather’s funeral in March 2014.