Jerry Sipp

David Crain was simply the best.  All of you who knew Dave will remember all the laughs he doled out with his oddball sense of humor.  He used that humor and the love of his family and devoted friends to help him outlive his projected lifespan as a C 3/4 quadriplegic.  I had the privilege of helping care for Dave for the last few years of his life.  People invariably tell me that I was a good friend to make such a sacrifice.  But anyone who knew the boy knows that he gave back much more than he received.  I'm a helluva lot better man for knowing him.  

I was honored to be one of the people chosen to speak at the celebration of his life after his passing.  These are the words I spoke about the best friend I will ever have.

My name is Jerry Sipp, and I had the honor of calling David Crain my best friend since I was 11 years old.  So that makes it, what, a good ten years now.  Just making sure you were paying attention.

There’s about a .0000001% chance I’ll make it through this speech at all, much less without crying.  But I don’t have a single tear for Dave.  My buddy is finally free.  He took the Express Train straight to Heaven, and he’s now up there, having a cold one with his beloved Colonel on some fishing boat, chasing after all the really attractive female angels, and making the rest of them laugh their wings off.

We all know Dave is here with us in spirit.  But I laugh when I think of the idea of him sitting here right now.  Dave hated being the center of attention, and he’d be eating Maalox tablets like they were Cracker Jacks.

The story of how Dave and I met is legendary in Crain lore.  Dave was a military brat, so he moved all the time and had to learn to fit in whenever he got to a new town.  When he arrived in Chapel Hill in 6th grade, I had already had my growth spurt and was nearly as big as I am now.  People thought I was going to be the next Shaq.  So the initiation the cruel kids chose for Dave was to follow me into the bathroom, climb up on the toilet in the adjoining stall, point at me while I was doing my business and laugh hysterically.  He was a quick and wormy little guy, which was lucky.  If I would have caught him, we would have been here paying tribute to him 34 earlier, cuz I would have killed him.  I finally snuck up on him one day and was getting ready to pummel him when I looked over his shoulder and saw him drawing the funniest looking faces I’d ever seen.  He looked at me in terror, but I couldn’t help but laugh.  He saved his life by offering to teach me how to draw cartoons, and I’ve called him my best friend ever since.

Notice I didn’t say that Dave and I are best friends.  I’m not unique in that way.  I’d be willing to bet that in David’s amazing life, he had any number of people in this room and around the country who thought of David Crain as Best Friend.  I know he is best friend to the man he called Colonel, or sometimes Cernups.  I’ve never known a father and son who were so close, they were nearly the same person.  He is absolutely the best friend of the woman he affectionately called Dumplin, his amazing mother who has forever redefined the word “dedication” for me.  His awesome sister, Laura, was the only person on God’s green Earth that could have gotten away with calling him Lunchmeat.  Now that is friendship.  I would expect the little punk kid he called Hacksaw, who rode up on his bike without a seat and never left, thought of Dave and his Nintendo machine as his best buddy.  No matter where in the world his pal Matt’s wanderlust took him, he always found his way back to his buddy at 404 Camden.  

Whether you were his childhood friend, his college roommate, the object of his affection, the young man who helped him into bed at night, or even someone he just met, Dave had a way of making you feel special, with no effort whatsoever.  I expect there isn’t one of Dave’s wonderful nurse’s aides here who doesn’t believe that he did as much for her as she did for him.  Gabriel and Bryan, and my daughter Sabrina called him Uncle Dave.  And of course, he wasn’t really even my daughter’s uncle.  But it was more than a term of affection.  When Dave loved you, he had a way of making you feel like family.  That’s not right.  I don’t know of a word that is closer than family, but that’s the way he made you feel.  Like someone who was closer to you than your own family.

I know people who haven’t seen Darling Dave in 25 years who still consider him the funniest guy they ever met.  Whether he was drawing one of his 28 children’s books, making his own funny faces, putting live crickets in his chewing tobacco, or getting thrown off the junior high school baseball team for mooning the arch rivals on their team bus, Dave made people laugh like no comedian could ever dream of.  I know dozens of people who have never even MET David Crain who consider him one of their greatest role models in life.  Dave and my friend Steve Lloyd spent about 10 hours of his 45 years together.  But it was Steve who asked Dave to illustrate his first children’s book, and he told me today that David was one of the heroes of his life.  

Middle school, high school, college essays have been written about this crazy character, this inspiring mentor, this man who never earned a dime after the age of 22 and couldn’t move anything but his head, but still found a way to become their hero.  

Ole Daveups didn’t get to live the life he wanted.  He hadn’t asked for much.  He just wanted a decent job, a sweet wife, 2.5 kids, and time to take them down to some creek to dig under rock for weird bugs and go fishing.   He was always so upbeat, he showed his disappointment to very few people.  But he told me many times that he didn’t understand why they invented people like him.  I think he often wondered whether the life he was forced to live was a life worth living.  

Look around you.  Listen to the words.  Feel the overwhelming love in this room.  Imagine when it is your time to look down, that you had earned such admiration, had inspired so many.  Imagine that nearly everyone you had ever met considered you one of the greatest influences in their life.  Imagine when it is your time, you felt a world of love positively overflowing from so many overflowing hearts.  Without ever trying, David Crain showed us all how a life is supposed to be.  And that, my friends, is a life worth living.