On my dad

My dad Bill O'Connell, me, and my mom

My dad died Saturday.

We buried him today. Here is what I said at his funeral:

As [my sister] Kelly related, Dad was a storyteller, and among the stories he would tell were those of his working world of accounting and finance.
Per a humorous definition, the CFO is “the person in any business enterprise most likely to know what is actually going on, but least likely to be able to do anything about it.”

Some of you may have heard the story of the car battery being stolen when he took the C.P.A. exam in Springfield, or of the warehouses he went through all over New England when he was in auditing at Coopers and Lybrand, or of the wrangles with the international ITT management when he worked in Clinton. There were also many stories of elder meetings at Holden Chapel about budgets.

For much of my high school and college, Dad worked in start-up technology companies; there were many in the 1980s and early 90’s. We quickly learned as a family the truism that the one person who always loses his job when a company gets bought (usually the goal for a start up) is the CFO.
This included the time when Dad lost his job the week before I left for my senior year of college, a week Dad largely spent on the phone with the college financial aid office, which ensured that I could finish my degree.

One of Dad’s favorite jokes about accountants was some version of this one: 

A mathematician,  a statistician, and an accountant walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “how much is 2 + 2?”

The mathematician says, “4”

The statistician says, “With a 99% confidence level, I can predict the answer will be 4.”

The accountant leans across the bar and says, “What do you want the answer to be?”

We often tell jokes about things we’re uncomfortable about, of course, and people in the main are very uncomfortable about money. Many don’t like to talk about money, feel they don’t understand money, and so we make jokes about those who do.

Dad knew and made his life’s work helping more people understand that money is how we make things happen: it’s how you keep airmen in the field; it’s how you track what you’ve done; it’s how you build a family; it’s how you educate children; it’s how you build a company; it’s how you come together as a church to serve people. 

How we spend money is how we get things done and shows what we think is important. If you don’t understand and take care with the budget, you can’t take care of anything else. 

Those in finance may, as another line goes, “solve problems you didn’t know you had in a way you don’t understand,” but if we don’t have and value those who do that work, much of the precious, important work we do cannot happen..

I know so many of us in different ways have reason to be grateful for not only Dad’s skill and experience, but also the care and values with which he used them. It is something I carry forward every day, and I hope that you will, too.