From Dave's Facebook page
Matt Cullen
February 24, 1931 – January 5, 2022
It took me exactly 1 week to post this. Just couldn’t do it. Tough week, but so much better than last week! I woke up determined to get back into the swing of things today, and made my 1st ToDo list since, started knocking them out. This was on it.
I wrote this short bio/tribute for the funeral program. I only had 20 minutes, so not my best work, but . . . writing on deadline, seems appropriate. (I was given 2 hours, but used most of that traveling, and getting input from siblings on revisions.)
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Dad didn’t just HAVE nine kids and eleven grandkids, we were his
life’s work. He worked relentlessly at manager/accounting jobs by
day, raising us, and building his small rental empire on borrowed
time—all with the goal of ensuring he could send all of us to
college and set us up for whatever futures we could dream.
Matt was a quiet, tender man, who craved mental challenges like
outsmarting the stock market, and especially bridge—training up
his kids to serve as worthy opponents to practice with Joan.
He put everyone else’s needs first—always thinking first of Joan
and then us kids, famously forgoing work lunches, a lifetime of
McDonalds bags at his desk to save a few dollars. Right up to the
final hospital stay, he was thinking of us first, reporting his
condition as “perfect” to avoid worry. Matt went out an optimist,
and a fighter. He never gave up, never gave in, and lit the fire in
twenty of us, where his fight lives on.
That’s the way, Matt.