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The challenge that I find that I face when reminiscing about Dad is that so much of what I remember about him is bound up with who I am - or at least who I aspire to be.
He loved nature. Some of my earliest memories are of the various camping trips we went on. Racoons on the back porch, starfish in tide-pools, gargantuan trees in Cathedral Grove... And of simple family walks with Dad through the local forest he called "the Wild Woods of the North" - a tradition carried on with his grand-kids in "the Wild Woods of the East" as the local forests were cut down to make way for subdivisions.
He loved God. He taught me to pray and read Bible stories to me. He brought us to church faithfully every Sunday, and his delight at his children's growing love of God and of the Scriptures was evident to us.
Above all - and this in no way takes away from his love of God; it was, in fact, the primary expression of his love for God - Dad loved people. Friends and family were hugely important to him, but his love for those around him went much further than that.

Dad believed the best of people. Perhaps the first point at which I became aware of my dad as someone known to others outside the circle of our immediate family was around age ten when the speaker at the Bible camp I was at told me that he knew my dad. While I was struggling with the new idea that someone else - someone well-known and important - actually knew my dad, the speaker said something else that has stuck with me to this day: "I've never known him to say anything bad about anyone."
As I watched Dad over the years as I grew up, this rang true. Not, perhaps, in a strictly literal sense - no one can never say anything bad about anyone - but I saw, in circumstance after circumstance where people might naturally condemn, Dad would, instead, seek to understand, and understand in a way that clearly sought to believe the best about the person and their motives.
Dad's love of debate and his defence of traditional Judaeo-Christian values inevitably brought him into conflict with others who didn't share Dad's values. Dad related to me once that one of his opponents had said to him that "When the revolution comes, Ted, you'll be the first up against the wall." Dad's response? He called him his favourite Marxist.
This was typical of Dad: along with a great sense of humour, he had a deep respect for anyone he perceived to be thoughtful and well-motivated, whether they agreed with him or not. He loved learning through dialogue: he knew enough to know that he didn't know everything, and he was thankful to those who thoughtfully challenged him to think through what he believed, why, and how best to articulate it.
But despite Dad's deep and abiding love for debate and conversation (I still remember when he noted that I was getting good at talking with adults and paid me the high compliment of telling me that I was becoming a good conversationalist), he cared about people, not just people's intellects or even their ability to chat with him. His assortment of friends was rich and varied - though admittedly, most of them shared Dad's love of conversation - and he was loyal to each and every one of them, appreciating them for who they were, making sure he spent time with them and always concerned for their welfare, right to the end. It was hard on him, in his later years, to see so many of his friends and family reach their end, but there were few more faithful visitors to the hospitals and to the old-folks' homes than my father.
Above all, I remember my father as a man of honour, one absolutely committed to using every resource at his disposal to fight for the welfare of all those around him. It didn't matter to him, ultimately, whether or not a cause was "winnable" - if it was something worth fighting for, he fought for it. Given society's shift away from Judaeo-Christian values, this meant that Dad found a lot of causes to fight for over the years - and that he ended up on the "losing" side, or at best ended up fighting a "rearguard action" in most of those battles. This was naturally discouraging for Dad at times - I remember him lamenting that it seemed that whenever he joined a political party, it would shortly thereafter suffer some devastating defeat and be destroyed. And it was true: I was with him, fighting alongside him, in a number of those defeats. But that this was in no way due to Dad can be seen in the fact that the one time Dad took on a cause that was not going against the mainstream of public opinion, when he rallied the forces to save the heritage elementary school that we had all attended as children and that Mom had taught at, he won. But Dad never fought simply to win. As with the many board games and card games he played and lost, the main point of the exercise was the people involved: he fought, as he played, for them, for the common good, for love.
I think Dad was torn, at the end, having "fought the good fight", between the approaches to death described by Dylan Thomas and by John Donne. He loved his wife, his friends, his kids and grand-kids deeply, and, for their sake, primarily, his conscious approach to dying was that of Dylan Thomas: "Do not go gently into that good night,/ Rage, rage, against the dying of the light." One of his last words to his grandchildren was that he looked forward to getting better so that he could play with them again. On the other hand, his passing, when he was beyond thought, was absolutely peaceful. One of his last words to my brother was that he was not afraid of dying: it was like falling asleep, which he did every night. As John Donne puts it in his, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning": "As virtuous men pass mildly away,/ And whisper to their souls to go,/ Whilst some of their sad friends do say/ The breath goes now, and some say, No:" so was my father's passing. One moment he was breathing quietly, then, when I next looked up, he was gone.
My father was not perfect, but he was a man of honour, a man of love, a man of faith. Now, at the time of his passing, as I reflect on who he was and the impact he had on me and on all those around him, I am proud to be able to say, with as much conviction as I would have said it in my childhood: "When I grow up, I want to be like you, Dad."