This Eulogy was presented by Brian Skiba, father of Parker Skiba, at his Celebration of Life Ceremony on December 16, 2017.
Parker was Catherine’s and my son. He was Alexandra and Meaghan’s brother. He was a grandson, a nephew, a cousin and will be missed by his family immensely.
In the broader context of the world, he was part of the company he worked for, Snow, where he was known and loved by so many. Many of you are here today.
He was a Longhorn and had so many friends that he loved and loved him. Many of whom are here.
Many of you have had the pleasure of meeting in his journey of life.
For those that I have not, so many of you have reached out to me and our family and shared your loss and extended your condolences and we appreciate that.
Parker was a very special, unique person.
Every parent is entitled to say that, but in Parker’s case, I think you can all believe me.
He was brilliant.
He was funny.
He was generous.
He was kind.
He was curious.
He was capable.
He was wise beyond his years almost from the first day we brought him home from the hospital.
I remember the three children riding a beautiful antique merry-go-round when Parker was just perhaps 3 years old. While the girls beamed with joy and looked out from their perched positions on their horses or carriages, Parker stared up at the complex gears and mechanics making the animals go up-and-down and the merry-go-round circle. You could see his brain was going at 1000 miles per hour, just connecting dots at an unreasonable age.
He had a curiosity of how things worked that was without parallel.
That intellectual hunger drove so much of what he is and what his journeys were in life.
By age 8, Parker was quite unreasonably skilled with computers and video games.
He would buy video games, scan and forge new covers for the video game jackets to downgrade the ratings for the games to PG so as to assure his mother all was fine.
Parker spent his early school years in England, loved dearly by his British counterparts, he was the one “American” with those ridiculous computer skills.
He mastered fake driver’s licenses in the UK for his older sister Alexandra and her friends at boarding school by the ripe age of 9.
Living in Palo Alto when he was 11, he wanted to take a very advanced course in Adobe Photo Shop at Stanford’s summer program. You had to be 14 to enroll.
Of course, Parker presented a birth certificate that was adjusted accordingly, and to my shock and disbelief, by the third day of the class the teacher had largely acquiesced his role to Parker who proceeded to teach the rest of the class all the advanced capabilities of Photoshop. A few said “Hey, you know you don’t have any facial hair and seem small for 14!”.
There are so many snap shots of Parker’s life that are like that.
He rapidly assimilated new knowledge, connected dots, and then went from there to the next thing at speeds that left most of us dizzy.
Parker and I watched the Guardians of the Galaxy II on Monday evening today. It was a really funny movie and we had a great time together. I went to sleep about 11pm, and he stayed up on the couch to watch some more TV. He never woke up from the couch.
With some sense of humor, I tell myself that God realized he needed to do a major IT upgrade to get ready for the next hundred years. He was looking at very big data problems, block chain and security issues a scale we can’t really imagine. He needed an army of software engineers; preferably full-stack developers. The angels came down and found the entire shopping list in one single person, and that was Parker.
I will miss Parker so much. I will miss the young man he became that I was so proud of. We all will miss him.
Every moment with someone you love is extremely precious.
Making sure we all make the most of each of those moments is the only wisdom I think I can grasp from his loss at this stage.
We have many more speakers ahead, and Catherine, his mother, and Alexandra, one of his sisters, will speak next, followed by his Aunt Diane.
And we will have some co-workers at Snow Software. and fellow Longhorns speaking as well.
Thank you for your love of Parker and your support to our family.
