Hi, I’m John McDonald. My Dad, Victor Lee McDonald, passed away peacefully of natural causes around February 1, 2023. He would have been 74 on February 3rd. We are planning a celebration of life and would love for you to come. Please RSVP, so we can make sure there are enough tacos. Also, please feel free to forward this to any of Vic’s family/friends (the more the merrier!).

I am sending this invitation to you in advance because: 1) There’s a very low probability (impossible wasn’t a word Vic liked) I will be able to get many words out coherently; 2) Some of you may not be able to make it to the event but would still like to take some time to remember Vic; and 3) Most importantly, my Dad loathed long winded speeches at weddings, funerals and the like. Although it’s a struggle not to go overboard with the word count, my Dad also really disliked impersonal interactions of any kind, and I’m finding writing all this out therapeutic so I appreciate you (and Victor if he’s reading) getting this far. However, in his honor this is a link to a Bullet Point Tribute for those interested (I can hear him now: “John, can you send me the bullet points on this?”). This feels especially strange in this context, but he’d also always encourage me to start with the conclusion so he could see how interesting he thought the story would be before he spent much time on it, so here it goes. We all lost a fun-spirited, uniquely friendly man who has already Taught us so much and still has more wisdom to offer.  

First and foremost, Vic was endlessly and shamelessly supportive of his family and friends, Victormendations, Things That Aren’t Flowers and while he probably never verbalized it to anyone, an overarching maxim he lived deeply was moderation. He didn’t eat a perfect diet, but it was certainly moderate by American standards; he didn’t exercise like Arnold in his prime, but he stayed active; he worked extremely hard when warranted, but he knew when it was time to take a break; he never really had more than a glass of wine or two, but he sure loved to get together for a party (thanks for coming!). 

Ultimately, this moderation and balance made him fun to be around for a large swath of folks and generally a more complete person. A fun example is looking around the room here today (virtually or in person) and seeing Trump fans and Obama/Biden fans (even Bernie and Rand Paul fans!) whom he probably all had thought he was one of you. Ultimately, my view is that he wasn’t necessarily a fan of any particular politician, but he did support moderate, pragmatic policy which I think he recognized is a part of any politician’s agenda on some level, and he’d try to pry that out of each of them. In all cases, he absolutely loved learning others’ perspectives, and he had a real flair for sounding people out. His specialty was encouraging you to give your full viewpoint while he’d pepper in approving statements of increasing intensity from soft, moderate to hardcore to see where you were on the spectrum. Some examples of reflective questioning, I can think of  are: “That does sound great, how will they get that initiated”, “So interesting, how’s their polling looking?”. He’d be supportive and encouraging the whole time which made you think he was on your team, but at the end of one of these conversations, I was always impressed by how he’d somehow got me to reflect meaningfully on my own thinking. When I’d go into a conversation with him and advocate a very firm viewpoint, I’d come out of those conversations wondering if something taken to an extreme would actually be a good thing, and, more importantly, how realistic it was. In most cases, I’d end up coming to a more moderate viewpoint, thanks to Vic. As we’ve lost a great moderator who had a very large community of friends and family, I hope we can find ways to talk (maybe not quite as much as Vic 🙂) and, more importantly, to listen enthusiastically in order to find the pragmatic, moderate balance that I think made my Dad’s life and his impact productive and fun.

In this light, this tribute is a call to action to “Be A Victor” (oh boy did he want to see action!). If you’re at the celebration of life, he would love it if people would chat with someone they didn’t know. Other “Be A Victor” acts are things like chatting with a stranger at the coffee shop (I bet that’s how a lot of folks that are here met Victor); complimenting someone on their scarf in the line at the grocery store; making a silly face to a baby to get them to smile; texting the relative you never speak with about something you saw that they may find interesting. The examples of what he’d do to engage with people and start a conversation to find out what they were into and how he could contribute are endless.

Of course, the hit rate on these things isn’t necessarily great, maybe the baby doesn’t giggle or the relative doesn’t respond BUT Victor did these things constantly because the hit rate also isn’t 0. He also believed that it makes life more fun, and it can really make a positive difference.