Funeral Talk Excerpts by Uncle Mark

Funeral Talk Excerpts by Uncle Mark ---

“Without Joshua, no explanation was possible. And with Joshua, no explanation was necessary.”

I’m Joshua’s Uncle Mark.  And every once in a while I would hear Selma say something out of the blue something like “how did the cordless phone get into the toilet?”  And usually within a few moments, she would realize the absurdity of that question.  There was a little phrase that Selma and I liked to say, “Without Joshua, no explanation was possible.  And with Joshua, no explanation was necessary.”

Joshua and I had a lot of good times together.  Selma would bring him to my track meets.  And as I would walk to the starting line I would hear him yell out “Mark.”  And I would line up, and as previously demonstrated by Glenn and I up here, he would immediately look at me and go like that.  But in front of a lot of people, heading to a starting line, I didn’t want to fall all the way down, but I would hit my eye at least, and then I would look up in the stands, and his head would rear back in laughter.  And I have no idea if there was anybody that was at the meet that saw me walking, look up at him, smack my head back and then laugh a little bit and then continue on.  And also, Joshua really a lot of times would want to find me after a track meet.  And there is an awful lot of tall, skinny, brown-haired guys at the track meets.  And Joshua, at the end of a race, you get into a jumble, and you’re all around, everybody’s all over the place and it’s hard to find somebody.  And Selma would take Joshua to come and try to find me.  And he would stop every tall, brown-haired guy and turn them around, and say “Mark, Mark, Mark” and he would just go from person to person to person to person until he’d finally found me. 

I know Jacob and Janson like this one.  Jamie was there too, that you all know that sometimes he had a hard time starting his phrases.  And one time, Selma and family sitting there at Sacrament Meeting, I wasn’t there, but apparently I’ve been told I re-create it fairly well, but Joshua all of the sudden, out of the blue, said “mahewmishamedafeewatameheeremashoisemetahee whatime is it.”  Sometimes, for whatever reason, he just had a hard time starting what he wanted to say.

One time I was playing with Lydia, Lisa and John, Joshua’s oldest cousins.  We had a little game called court.  And it must have just been fun because we were young, but we would sit there and make up charges against each other, and sentence each other to funny things like hang upside down in the closet, and we were just sitting there playing court one day, and Joshua came running through the living room – he was pretty young at this time – buck naked.  And with that face, that you can’t describe, but if you’ve seen it you know what I’m talking about, that face, just funny.  Happy as can be, naked as the day he was born, through the living room and up the stairs, and two seconds later after that, Selma, phew, trying to find him as well.

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I remember as each young Eisenstat was growing up, it took them a while to learn how to absorb the blows.  And they all were able to do that.  And it was just amazing to me, the example that those young Eisenstats set in loving their brother.  Also, one of Joshua’s friends, Brett, when he came over [Wednesday] night, said something really funny that I wanted to repeat.  He said “You know you’ve been in the neighborhood a long time when Joshua smacks you and you just say, oh hey Josh.” 

Articles of Faith.  Article of Faith 13, I wanted to read and talk a little bit about Joshua.  It’s starts out by saying “We believe in being honest.”  Joshua wasn’t honest.  He would drop a plate, break it, and if you saw him, he would say “Wha hapn” with a look of innocence that he really didn’t know and he wanted you to tell him.  Also one time I went to visit him at Pleasant Grove High School.  I would do that when I was in college (in Ogden) and whenever I needed to be in Provo during the day, I would try to squeeze in a trip to Pleasant Grove High School and go see Joshua, or later Provo High School.  And I went to see him, and while I was in his class, he told the teacher “wa bathroom, wa bathroom.”  He needed to go to the bathroom.  And the teacher said okay.  And we went to the bathroom and we walked over, and he went into the boys bathroom – I guess I’m going to demonstrate this.  He went into the bathroom and this is the exact timing and sequence of what happened.  [Mark walks out to the hall, gets locked out and ends up knocking on the door to be let in.  President Sosa lets him in.]  We have to try that again.  Don’t let the door shut.

“I’m back.”  The door hadn’t even shut and he opened it up and said “I’m back.”  I asked the teacher what that was about.  And he said well, just like any high school boy, when Joshua wanted a break, he faked having to go to the bathroom, but he wasn’t very good at it.  Because they would take him, and they would go in and as soon as the door shut, he opened it back up and acted like he had gone to the bathroom.  So I don’t know that Joshua was very honest.

True, chaste, he was true, he was chaste.  He was benevolent.  He was virtuous.  And he did good to all men.  I also remember that a bishop gave a talk about Joshua and how there were certain commandments that he was exempt from and honest was one of those, and he was exempt.  But all of these other ones he lived to a spectacular degree.

And in Corinthians, we’ve talked a little bit about charity.  And it says “charity never faileth, but whether there be prophecies they shall fail, whether there be tongues they shall case, but whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away, and charity never fails, and that’s why our friendship, each of us that had friendships with Joshua, they never, ever failed.

We all had, I’ve just been thinking about this the last few days, how central that little boy was to our family.  The Joshua boy.  We all say with affection our Joshua names.  As Glenn mentioned earlier, we have a name that everybody else calls us by, and then we have a name that Joshua calls us by.  And it’s “Daddy”  “Selma.”  “Jamie.”  “Jatob.”  “Janson.”  And then “Jermy.”  And one that I miss, that he matured, he use to say my name and it would last almost sometimes up to 10 seconds long, he would say “Maaaaaaaaarrk.”  Every once in a while he would say it really, really long, and as he got older, he just started calling me “Mark.”  And I liked that.  I miss the old one.

I’m grateful that my tears were already all used up so that I could talk about the fun stuff.  And I was thinking also about Joshua, spoke at my farewell, and I was thinking earlier this week, that I’m speaking at his farewell.  And I’m going to close my talk with Joshua’s talk that he gave at my farewell ... I love you Joshua.  In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.