Writing a talk is hard, so I decided to write a song for my dad instead; it goes: “This is our Daddy Song. It isn’t very long.”

If dad were here he would start by telling us about “Life as it is” for 65 years dad saw life as it is; joy, laughter, and happiness beyond belief. As he loved to say it’s “unbelievable”. Of course there was pain, misery, and cruelty beyond belief as well; we live in a fallen world. But more importantly, there is healing and peace because of our Savior Jesus Christ. Dad knew that and he loved sharing it with people.

Very few days went by when he wasn’t asking our opinions about some Gospel principle he was pondering for an upcoming lesson. He loved to visit people and share messages about the Gospel. His favorite way to share Gospel truths was through parables, like the parable he wrote that started “many are cold, but few are frozen.” Or his elephant collection, which started with the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

Before coming to this earth, dad must have been one of the noble and great ones. His testimony of the Gospel was unshakable. He lived what James referred to as pure religion to “visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction“

In every calling dad had mom was right by his side. They were home teaching companions for most of their marriage. Their relationship was important to them, and they had a date night scheduled for every Friday.

Mom and dad summarized their courtship with the phrase: “We Wrote. We Met. We Married.” My mom had been writing one of my dad’s mission companions who gave my dad her address. Dad wrote her a letter and they started writing somewhat regularly. Then after my dad returned from his mission, he ended up as mom’s home teacher. They dated for a while until one day they pedaled up to the zoo on bikes. After pedaling over to This Is The Place monument my dad presented my mom with a 1-carrot ring (made from a real live carrot). They were married in the Manti Temple on October 18th 1980; the covenants they made there give us the assurance that we can be a family forever.

When we were babies dad would bounce us on his knee and shake our hand vigorously in all directions. Knowing that we could only see 9 inches in front of our face, he would walk around the house showing us things, and using his hand to measure 9 inches from each object he showed us. When he ran out of his own babies to hold, dad often borrow babies from others at church. He was tickled pink when he finally got grandchildren of his own and became “Grand Daddy Dearest.”

As children dad involved us in everything he did. If he was working on cleaning an ice cream machine, he would ask us to stir the ice cream mixture in the bucket or put our ear to the machine and tell him when it cycled off. We learned to clean refrigerators to help him with his business. He would cart the whole family along when someone was moving, so we could carry boxes in a bucket brigade, while he helped move the heavy furniture. Or he would line us up on the sidewalk with snow shovels and have us shovel the sidewalks all up and down the street.

Our family song was “Have I Done Any Good In The World Today?” and dad’s life was an example of that song in action. Even when he was too sick to walk by himself, he would ask if there was anything he could do to help, without actually getting involved?

We learned about hard work through dad’s example. When we were young we were often eager to help, but as we got older, dad related to the comic that said “there is nothing like a family project to get a little bit of alone time.”

As we became teenagers dad got the notion in his head that he wanted our house to be a “hanging out house.” It started out meaning that our friends liked to hang out there but it ended up meaning that we had pictures and replicas of outhouses hanging on the walls. Luckily my friends did enjoy hanging out at our house. Every time they would come over dad would ask them their names and their favorite colors; he never remembered them from one time to the next, but to be fair, they never told him the same the same color twice in a row either. Once every person in the room claimed their favorite color was yellow just to mess with him.

Dad cared deeply about our education and expected us to do well in school. If we made the mistake of telling him we didn’t have homework, he told us to go up to our teacher and say “it’s my right to have homework!” (we never did.) Both my parents attended every parent teacher conference for every one of their six children. Even when we were all in high school they personally visited upwards of 30 teachers at parent conferences; afterwards they would sit us down individually and tell us what our teachers said about us. My dad himself had numerous technical degrees from the community college and all of his living children now have college degrees.

Once most of us had grown up and moved away dad was always anxious to hear about our lives. He’d say “How can I live vicariously through you if you don’t tell me what’s going on in your life?” His favorite time of day to communicate was the middle of the night.

Dad also wanted us to be self reliant as adults. He taught us to cook for ourselves, mow the lawn, change a tire, etc. We didn’t know how often the skill of changing a tire would come in handy until we lost every single tire on the van during a road trip to Kansas.

Traditions were also important to dad. He believed strongly in Gospel traditions like Family Home Evening and Family Councils. Like Tevye in The Fiddler on the Roof he taught that “because of our traditions that everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.” At our house if you did something at least three times, even if it was by accident, it became a tradition. One tradition that made dad famous was hanging the Christmas tree from the ceiling so the children wouldn’t knock it over. On our birthdays we would get money wrapped in color coded duct-tape, either as coin necklaces or sequential bills in a duct-taped envelope. Dad was most pleased with himself when we couldn’t get them open; he thought it would make the money last longer.

I wish I had enough time to tell about family road-trips, hiking excursions, favorite movie quotes, dad breaking out into song, and all the other memories that remind us how much dad loved life and family.

After a faithful life of service and testimony dad has now joined loving family members that are waiting for him in the spirit world. We miss dad. But we’re grateful to know that he is finally pain-free. And that because of Jesus Christ he will one day be resurrected and receive a perfect, glorified body. Hopefully they let him wear a beard.

In the spirit world, dad gets to continue the work of preaching the Gospel, which he loved so much in this life. We’re grateful for the knowledge that we’ll see him again. And we are thankful for his legacy of humor, service, and testimony.

We love you dad.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Dear brothers and sisters and family and friends, the reason I’m saying “dear brothers and sisters” is because I’ve been asked to represent the siblings, Lee’s siblings, and so quite literally I hope that my brothers and sisters appreciate what I was able to put together.

I am two years older than Lee. As youths we shared a lot of things: we slept in the same bedroom; we shared a paper route; we rode our bikes downtown together to work at Dad’s store. Another thing we shared as middle children in a large family was the belief that we were left out of a lot of the fun things that Mom and Dad with the older three girls and then with the younger two; the ones in the middle just got left out.

Something else we did a lot of was fight. Now, I guess all brothers probably fight; I would imagine that I wasn’t a real good brother some of that time. In recent years though, I’ve tried to do better; I’ve tried to be more understanding; to repent and figure out why we do things differently. I’m not really accustomed to talking a lot so when I go to visit Lee, I would usually sit and he would talk and I would listen. Our father once said that “Lee just marches to the beat of a different drummer” that’s why we’re all different.

I found that Lee and I still do many of the same things, just not for the same reason, or not in the same way. For example: we both wear a beard. You may have noticed that Lee wore a beard because it meant he didn’t have to shave; I wear a beard because my wife says it makes me more handsome. We both put up trees at Christmas time, I usually put mine on a stand on the floor; Lee sometimes hangs his from the ceiling. We just do things differently sometimes.

As I’ve talked to my other siblings to find out some feelings that they have, I found out that we have a lot of the same memories and perceptions of Lee. Lee loved family traditions. He made a special point of attending every family reunion, every wedding reception, every funeral; it didn’t matter if it was a long drive, he still made a point of attending.

One of those family traditions is a Labor Day celebration all the siblings and their families and basically all those who’ve descended from us meet together in Big Cottonwood Canyon at the same campsite for breakfast. Now the original purpose for this gathering was to celebrate the birthday of the oldest grandchild, who is Barry Vander Veur, but soon Lee started referring to it as “the Barry Doo” and I don’t think that was universally accepted by the whole family, but I think his family probably still refers to it as “the Barry Doo”.

At that occasion, tradition was that he would bring a big cooler full of drinks; and it would have his favorites, which are whole milk and orange juice, and he used to love soda pop. Anyway, it was whole milk it wasn’t fat-reduced (that wasn’t an option with Lee). He did cut back on soda pop after a while, but while I was there visiting with him this past year, one of the home health nurses came in to check on him and she saw a can of pop on the table and said “Lee! You know you can’t have that sugary stuff! It’ll kill you!” and he said “well…I only had one…” and she said “If you have to have a soft-drink, have a diet soft-drink.” and Lee says “We don’t drink diet soft-drinks in our house.”

Lee has traditions in gift-giving as well. One time I was over there and he had some different colored duct-tape, and he was sticking coins on them. I asked what that was all about and he said it started with his own kids, and he would get different colors of duct-tape (since they all have their own assigned color) and he would stick coins on it and duct-tape over it; and since they all knew their color, they would know who’s present this was by the color of the strip of duct-tape. And all they had to do was figure out how to pry that apart and get the coins out of it.

When I was in high school my dad bought me a little Honda 50 motorcycle that I could take to get to school, since it was too far to walk and not far enough to take the bus. When I went away to college then Lee inherited the Honda. It was not in great condition; frequently you had to push it and engage the clutch to get it to start. Gayle remembers going with Lee, helping him push that Honda, with him on it, until it was going fast enough so he could engage the transmission and hopefully it would start and ignite. He would go out and circle around and come back to pick her up, and she would try to hop on quickly so that it didn’t stop again and she’d have to push again. She said they would make kind of a game out of it to see how far they could go without actually stopping, so they didn’t have to do that extra push-start.

Kathy characterized Lee as having integrity and being very faithful in the Church. Lee did serve in many different callings in the Church. One of them: he was the Scout Master for many years; Now I don’t know where he got the ability or the nerve to do that; we weren’t brought up to be “outdoorsy” people. (I’m afraid I couldn’t be a scout master.) He told me that he would tell the scouts that he was the Scout Master but they could just call him “master”.

One thing that I found out was a life-changer for Lee was a talk that he heard by A. Theodore Tuttle. Elder Tuttle said that he looked forward to the day when he would not be known as “A Theodore Tuttle” but “The Theodore Tuttle.” And from that point on Lee wanted to be known not as “A Lee Soderborg” but as “The Lee Soderborg.” I think he succeeded.

Lee enjoyed learning about the Gospel and teaching it. I was helping him go through a big pile of papers and handwritten notes that were outlines of talks and lessons that he’d given over the years, and he just didn’t want to throw those away (some of them were just little scraps of paper) because they might be of use in the future, and he’d gone to all that trouble and he wanted to keep them

The Gospel is important to Lee and he taught his children to be faithful members of the Church. I’m sure that he taught them the great truths about death and resurrection: how death is just a part of a transition from this life to a more glorious one, if we live the commandments taught in the scriptures and by the holy prophets.

He loves his children, Lee did. He confided in me once that he was afraid that he had made some mistakes in how he’d dealt with them; afraid that somehow he had damaged a relationship and didn’t know how to get it fixed. I know how he feels about that too.

The beauty of the Gospel though is that its truths are eternal; love is eternal; forgiveness is eternal; families are forever. The Resurrection is a gift to all men; how we live our lives now will determine what Degree of Glory we will attain after this life. One day, Lee and Karen, and all their kids, will be reunited with perfect bodies that no longer hurt and no longer stop from achieving righteous goals.

The prophet Alma, in the Book of Mormon, taught “that the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body… whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life… the spirits of those who are righteous are received into a state of happiness, which is called paradise, a state of rest, a state of peace, where they shall rest from all their troubles and from all care, and sorrow.” When I think of this scripture, I envision what Uncle Robb said about a wonderful reunion going on with Lee, and his son Alex, and his sister Laurie, and his parents Alvin and Afton. In that paradise reunion, I imagine that Lee is providing the drinks.

I have a testimony the our Father in Heaven loves all of us and He wants us to do what we can to return to live with Him again. I bear you this testimony in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.