In memory of my Uncle Phil

https://www.buchananfuneralservice.com/obituaries/philip-wood/

This week, we attended the funeral of my Uncle Phil Wood. It was a very, very hard week for the Wood family. We’ve shed a lot of tears as we’ve grieved the loss of one of our very favorite people.

Throughout my life, Uncle Phil and Aunt Diana have been a consistent presence and encouragement. They have been there through many of our best days and worst days. You can infer from his obituary that Phil and Diana were busy people. They were never too busy for us, though. Our kids adore them and their kids. We do, too. I’m often asked how the firstborn daughter of two Texas Aggies ended up an Oklahoma State graduate. The answer is Phil and Diana Wood. There are no better representatives of or recruiters for Oklahoma State University. I tear up thinking about how much it meant to Careese and I to have them supporting our daughter throughout her college career—standing in the gap during the years we were largely unable to travel. We’re forever grateful.

Uncle Phil was one of a kind. He was perpetually amazed by the intricacies of, well, pretty much everything. He had this bizarre and wonderful combination of attributes: a childlike fascination with how things work combined with an engineer’s brain and a seemingly unending supply of patience and positivity. It was something to behold. There’s a scene in the movie Seabiscuit where Charles Howard (played by Jeff Bridges) is fascinated by a car. He spends hours taking the entire thing apart piece by piece while marveling at the details of its construction. Eventually, the camera pans out and you see a happily exhausted, grease-covered Jeff Bridges standing with his hands on his hips—staring at his completely disassembled vehicle. He pauses for a moment to appreciate the magnitude of the couple thousand parts scattered upon the ground. Then, he puts the thing back together piece by piece, excitedly making some performance tweaks and improvements along the way.

That scene reminded me of my Uncle Phil. I could see him disassembling an entire car and putting it back together sImply for the joy of understanding how it worked. Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if he had done that exact thing at some point during his life. There were few things he couldn’t fix and few things he wasn’t amazed by. One of many examples: I had an hour-long conversation with him about the wonder that is concrete. He loved the stuff. “It’s amazing, just amazing!” He would say as he launched into a detailed explanation about how the foundations for skyscrapers were created.

One of my family’s favorite “quintessential Uncle Phil” stories was about the day the ice cream machine at Jason’s Deli was broken. Uncle Phil wanted ice cream. Uncle Phil wanted others to have ice cream. So, he opened the thing up and fixed it right there in the middle of the hustle and bustle of Jason’s Deli. Voila. Ice cream.

I could go on and on about my Uncle Phil. He certainly left a mark on this world and on us. But, as I reminisce today, there are a couple things I’m carrying with me.

1) Phil was always amazed by how things work rather than frustrated by how they don’t. That’s a better way to live life.

2) You can be very, very driven and successful and still be present in every conversation.

It gives me great joy to think of Uncle Phil walking with his creator today, asking a billion questions about the inner workings of physics, engineering, and biology. Though I don’t know that eternity will be quite long enough to answer all his questions or discuss all his thoughts, today I rest in the fact that all of Phil’s curiosity has now been satisfied. All his longings have been fulfilled. His joy has been made complete, and the Jesus he knew is even better than his brilliant mind could have imagined.

Thanks for all the memories, Uncle Phil. Thanks for treating my kids like grandkids. Thanks for showing up for us in our darkest of hours, on our monumental days, and in so many days in between. Thanks for fixing a lot of our broken things…and a lot of the world’s broken things. Thanks for taking the kids on all the horseback rides. Thanks for all the gardening tips and how-tos. Thank you for being a great representative of your alma mater. Thanks for being an even better representative of Jesus and Christianity.