WILLIAM EARL CANADY

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Amory Funeral Home - Yorktown

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WILLIAM CANADY Obituary

Name: Graveside service for WILLIAM EARL CANADY
Start: 2020-08-01T15:00:00.000Z
Location: Peninsula Memorial Park

William Earl Canady, 80, passed away on June 5, 2020. A graveside service will be held on Saturday, August 1, 2020 at 11:00 AM in Peninsula Memorial Park. Arrangements by Amory Funeral Home.

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Published by Daily Press on Jul. 26, 2020.

Memories and Condolences
for WILLIAM CANADY

Sponsored by Amory Funeral Home - Yorktown.

1 Entry

KEITH CANADY

August 3, 2020

I should have been en route right about now to Hampton, VA to attend my father's memorial service. But with COVID-19 cases exploding in Knoxville and all across Hampton and the rest of the peninsula, I couldn't in good conscience risk the chance of exposure to myself or any of my loved ones. Things have changed rapidly in just the last six weeks when we were there, the week he passed.

So, below are the remarks I had prepared.

My father was a very quiet man. I didn’t inherit that from him. I can be very talkative, and many times our conversations were pretty one-sided. By that I mean, I would ramble on for paragraphs and pages, and he would offer up literally just a word or two in response, if even that. But as I grew older, I began to realize that he was like that with everyone. Not rude, not mean. Just a very quiet man. A man of few words.

And that man of a few words started out as a shy boy in the country. By the country, I mean South Carolina. And by the country in South Carolina, I mean dirt roads, tobacco fields and miles from the big city of Loris, South Carolina. And by big city, I mean the population of Loris was 1,238 the year my father was born. They are up to 2,396 now. So there he was, a country boy on those dirt roads with his bare feet, one of nine children born into poverty, sharecropper-style poverty. I don’t know what he was like as a kid, but I know what his mother was like when I was kid. Mean. Tough. She was a no-holds barred country woman. She was not affectionate. If you have ever been a kid, at some point you acted up. When her kids acted up, she threatened to take them to the doctor for a shot. I think one of the main reasons my father was a quiet man was because he was still shy and scared. He grew up with a lot of siblings, but not much affection. He didn’t know how to show it, because he was never taught. I think he stayed quiet to keep out of the way.

He obviously was not a fan of his upbringing, because as soon as he could, he left those dirt roads and tobacco fields. He was the only one of those nine kids to do so. Had he just stayed put, decided to put up with it and not sought out a little bit better life in coastal Virginia, I wouldn’t be here today.

So he grew into a man of few words. But as you know, actions speak louder than words. A few things stick out about that. Years ago, I was going through a tough time, and I needed to unload, he and I stood on the banks of the York River and we watched my older two sons playing on the dock. I was hitting him with those paragraphs and pages again. The final score was Keith 10,001 words, Earl 5. But he just stood there while we both got ate up by mosquitoes and listened for as long as I wanted to talk. Actions, not words.

When his second wife Bobbie died, they had been married for over 20 years. It was hard on him. My son Spencer was barely a teenager at the time, and had never been to a funeral before. He was having a tough time and was upset. I was a pallbearer and was sitting away from him. I looked over and Dad had his arm around Spencer’s shoulder, being very calm and comforting his grandson. Actions not words.

He worked for the same company for 38 years. And then, after a few years of retirement, he said he was bored and went back to work. He told me one time that his new job was fine, and they paid him very well, but he really didn’t have much to do, and he felt guilty for taking the money they paid him for not doing anything. I wanted to know if they were hiring. He decided to stop working there. Actions not words.

So Pop, it’s time for me to stop with the words. You always said not to talk, it would scare the fish we were trying to catch. And now that you’ve gone fishing, I just wanted to say, even though things between us were not always as I hoped they would be, because you sought a better life, in return, you gave me life. And because you made that choice, you gave me Ryan, Michaela, Spencer, Rayna, Braxton and Sonya. Thanks, old man.

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