Last weekend I attended the memorial service for Harold Taylor, a FedEx friend and colleague who had succumbed to cancer in February. About a dozen of his co-workers gathered with family and friends in a chapel in Pontotoc, Mississippi. Tables were set up with photos and mementos. He had been a music major in college, so it wasn’t a surprise to see his trumpet. A mannequin in his full-dress Army uniform stood at attention in the front. The print that FedEx gives to employees on their twenty-fifth anniversary commemorating the year that they were hired served as backdrop to a few books pulled from the jam-packed floor-to-ceiling shelves that lined the walls of his study. Data Governance was displayed most prominently.
Our paths had crossed a few times when he managed an Information Security Data and Analytics team in Memphis, but oddly enough it wasn’t until he moved to New Berlin, Wisconsin and joined the FedEx SmartPost analytics team that we started working together. A few years later he returned to Memphis as part of a newly-formed Data Architecture group.
When it came to Information Management and Data Governance, he was the truest of true believers, and he was especially passionate about Data Stewardship. I knew that when I ventured into the area where he and his team sat, I would be there for at least a half-hour and usually longer. We would all discuss and debate and plan, and sometimes we would get shushed by neighbors in the next aisle.
Anybody who had spent more than roughly thirty seconds with him, knew how much he loved his wife, Katie. He referred to her as “the love of my life,” and the two of them were a perfect match. They had just moved to Pontotoc a couple years ago and set up a family farm with gardens, animals, bees … farm stuff. He was so excited about the farm. He was diagnosed with cancer less than two and a half years later.
On Christmas Eve, in one of his last messages to his friends, he wrote, “I’m not racked with pain, sad, angry, or scared. In fact, I’m loved by my wife, family, and friends. I’m happy, and feeling grateful for life’s blessings. I love you all more than you can imagine, and fear only one thing…that I haven’t told each of you about Jesus Christ. My greatest gift would be to know that every one of you know him as your personal Lord and Savior. Please pray for me, as I continue to pray for each of you and your families. Please forgive me for any hurt I’ve caused any of you, and may God bless and keep you all.”
Well done, good and faithful servant.
Featured image for this post by Monique Clark.
