Not in the physical senseâhe worked hard, he trav- eled a lot, and he missed more than a few baseball and soccer games
KANNON K. SHANMUGAM REMARKS AT MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR K. SAM SHANMUGAM LAWRENCE, KANSAS OCTOBER 14, 2017 Good afternoon. My name is Kannon Shanmugam, and on behalf of my family, welcome to this memorial service for my father, Dr. Sam Shanmugam. As a lawyer, I traffic in words for a living. But how to capture the life of a man I loved so dearly in just a few minutes? It is difficult to know even where to begin when it comes to my dad, such is the richness of his life story. So let me start with the bare facts, which most of you will already know. Dad was born in 1943 in a small village in rural India, not far from the banks of the Cauvery River—the Ganges of the South. In 1968, he emigrated to the United States to pursue his education. He arrived in Stillwater, Oklahoma, with $8 in his pocket and two suitcases—one of which was filled with ties, because my grandfather thought that men in America always wore ties. My dad may have been poor in material terms, but he came to this country with two very important things: a new bride and a faith in the promise of America. As it turned out, those two things gave him everything. My mother, his wife of nearly 49 years, gave him a strong marriage and the tight-knit family you see before you today. And Dad’s faith in the promise of America gave him a spectacular career as a distinguished professor at the University of Kansas and a world-renowned expert in communications systems design. From the speakers who follow me, you will hear more about all of those things. And knowing my dad, I imagine that you will hear quite a few stories. Many of them will actually be true. But in the few minutes I have this afternoon to reflect on this impossibly full life, I want to focus instead on the qualities that made Dad who he was—the finest man I have ever known. First and foremost, Dad was fiercely loyal, utterly devoted to his family and his friends. True loyalty is a rare quality—in Washington, the city where I live, it is almost unheard of. But Dad had it in spades. He would do anything for his friends— there are many in the audience who will attest to my dad’s loaning them money, or taking them to a doctor’s appointment, or giving them advice at a critical life juncture. It was no surprise that, when Dad suffered his stroke three years ago, so many friends rallied around him in the same way. And over the last three years, the debts that others owed to him were repaid in kind and in full.
Needless to say, Dad’s devotion extended to his family. When I think back to Dad’s role in my childhood, the one word I keep coming back to is “present.” Dad was always present in my life. Not in the physical sense—he worked hard, he traveled a lot, and he missed more than a few baseball and soccer games along the way. But like Forrest Gump, he was somehow always there at the moments that mattered most—whether for the big game or the big test. And he was always supportive of the decisions my brother and I made, even when I suspect he disagreed with them. (When I told Dad in college that I wanted to become a sportswriter, I’m quite sure he knew it would pass. And as usual, he was right.) Dad was fiercely patriotic, too—a quality that no doubt grew out of his sense of loyalty. He passionately loved the United States, with the possible exception of the State of Missouri. It was one of the proudest moments of his life when he took the oath and became an American citizen. And he loved his home State of Kansas and the State’s flagship university, which he served over parts of five decades. You could hear a note of Kansas in every word he said—his Indian accent largely if not completely superseded over the years by the broad accent of the Plains. Dad was famously impatient. I think that’s because he lived life at warp speed, and he had no tolerance for anything that got in the way. I promised I wouldn’t tell any stories, but I have to tell just one. It was the summer of 1995. I was about to start law school, and I was feeling a bit down because I had just broken up with a girlfriend I really liked. So one evening, Dad decided that we should go out for burgers, just the two of us, a man-to-man talk. Of course, this being my dad, we got about 500 yards down Clinton Parkway when he promptly got pulled over for speeding. (He was going 60 in a 45, if memory serves.) This became known in Shanmugam family lore as the “hundred-dollar burger.” Of course, stories like this are only really memorable if they have a happy ending. A couple of months later, I got back together with that girlfriend, and she is sitting here today as my wife of nearly 15 years and the mother of these three wonderful boys. After Vicki and I got married, we held the reception right up the street from here at Alvamar. It was probably the happiest I have ever seen my dad, giddy at the improbability that I had found someone so special to marry me. And at the reception, Dad came up to me, leaned over, and said, “The burger was worth it.” Dad had a thirst for learning. Of course, Indian-American parents are renowned for their preoccupation with education. But for Dad, education was not just about getting ahead. He was always interested in learning for learning’s sake. It was for that reason, I think, that he didn’t blink an eye when I told him that I intended to major in Latin in college. When Dad would come to one of my Supreme Court 2
arguments, he would always want to talk about the substance of the cases, not just the performance of the lawyers—though, as I can attest, he was a savvy critic of the latter. And his thirst for learning, I think, explained his lifelong love of travel. (That, and his insatiable desire to accumulate frequent-flier miles.) For someone so relentlessly rational, Dad could be unexpectedly impetuous. One night in the winter of 2005, we were sitting around the house watching Channel 11 when a documentary came on about Biking Across Kansas, the annual ride across the State. I made the mistake of teasing Dad that he should sign up. Of course, by the time I got back to Washington the next morning, he had. And sure enough, he biked that summer from Elkhart in the southwest corner of the State all the way to White Cloud in the northeast—a distance of over 500 miles in sweltering conditions. As they say these days, that was “peak Dad.” Finally, Dad was a man’s man, in the best sense of the phrase. He was more Old Spice than Axe. He loved playing and watching sports, especially KU basketball and football. (Though I’m quite sure he timed his passing to avoid watching yet another hapless KU football season.) He could fix just about anything, though he was sometimes better at taking things apart than putting them back together. Always the engineer, he personally designed our beloved family home just around the corner from here, which he would always describe as “the house on Golden Pond.” When I reflect on Dad’s qualities, I realize that I am the man I am today because of my father. I model myself on him in so many ways. He was my best friend, as I suspect he was for quite a number of the people in the room today. And as I look out at my own sons, I hope I can be the father to them that my father was to me—a man of great strength, great judgment, and great integrity. Today is about celebrating the life of my father, but I hope you will permit me one personal reflection. In 2017, I have experienced joy and sadness in equal measure. At the end of April, we celebrated the unexpected arrival of Henry, our third son. And at the beginning of August, we mourned the sudden departure of my father. In the span of just three months, I held our son in the first minute of his life, and I held my father’s hand in the last minute of his. My father passed away at Lawrence Memorial Hospital on a sunny summer’s afternoon, just down the hall from the room where I came into the world on a snowy winter’s morning. The cycle of life, joy and sadness in equal measure. Human life is so, so precious, and our time here passes in the blink of an eye. My father deserved to have longer with us, cut down cruelly by a stroke barely a week into his retirement. But it is hard to be too angry about that, because it is hard 3
to imagine a person making more of his life than my father did in the time he had— the arc of a life that started in that Indian village and ended in this special city on a hill in the American heartland. We owe it to my father to ensure that America remains a place where human life is valued and where all things are possible. We owe it to him to live our lives as he did, fully and fearlessly. And we should all hope to be remembered as he will be—as a man who made the world a better place, and who made all of us who were fortunate enough to know him better people.
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