This is the eulogy that I delivered for my grandfather on the evening of January 16^th,2008 at the Joseph Farenga and Son Funeral Home. Eulogy is Greek word. Is mean "eu" for the good, in the Greek, and logos, which is mean the word. So you get the good word. Is what you say when the someone, he die. You say the good word.

That what help you to remember...

Vasilios Kotsias, my grandfather, and our husband, and father, and uncle, and cousin, and brother, and friend, was a man of little words.

But he made the most of the words he used.

Let me prove it. There's this time last summer, when we were having dinner at the house in Riverhead, a house he bought with the money he earned working double shifts at the New York Hilton Hotel, where my cousin, Little Michael, who's not so little anymore, came over to eat.

Pappou sat there chomping at his salad, and Michael kept yabbering away about video games or school or some nonsense like that.

I swear, throughout dinner you didn't hear one peep out of Pappou.

And then just out of nowhere, in the middle of one of Michael's sentences, he put his head up and said, "You know what Michael? You talk too much."

To Pappou, everyone talked too much.

He even talked too much when telling other people that they talked too much.

Instead of actually saying, "You talk too much," Pappou used to put his hand in the air and mime a chatting motion.

"Yeah, Pappou," I used to tell him, "you're right."

"Good-a boy," he'd tell you if you agreed with him.

And I always would. And to him, I always was.

He'd tell me so.

"Michael, you a good-a boy…when you sleeping."

That Pappou, he got me every time.

He was funny.

If you lost the remote and were dumb enough to ask him where it went, he'd tell you exactly where it was. "In my pocket," he'd say, "In my pocket."

And he'd reach his hand into his pocket to show us.

He'd do this thing where he'd put his fist up to my nose like he was going to punch me. "Punch in the nose," he'd say.

Every single time I flinched, and every single time he'd open his fist and pat my head, and say, "Michael, why you scared? I'm not going to hit you."

And he never would.

And one second later he'd turn around and say, "Punch in the nose!"

And I'd flinch again. And he'd tell me again. And he'd do it again.

If the light was still on when you'd leave a room, he'd remind you. "Turn it off," he'd say, "Save few pennies."

Save few pennies.

And my god, that's why this is so hard. It was hard to lose Vasilios Kotsias as our grandfather and father and husband and uncle and cousin and friend.

But it was even harder to lose him because he was such a good person.

There's a part of me that believes that if Pappou could be in this room today to see how sad we are that he's gone, that he'd feel bad. He would never want anyone he loved to be sad.

Not even for him.

So I'm going to leave you with a story that I've never told before. It's about the last of his grandchildren Athena, and she doesn't even know it because she was too young to remember.

This was back when Athena was still living in Orlando with her mom and she had just been born and her mom brought her for a visit.

The women took care of Athena most of the time, but we all know that babies are hard to deal with, so one day, they decided to go shopping and left Athena with me and Pappou.

The women weren't even out the door before Athena started crying.

Pappou turned to me to do something.

I didn't know what to do. I had never seen a baby this close before. I had seen them on TV, but not in their natural habitat crawling on the floor, so I turned back to Pappou and told him that I had no idea what to do.

Athena looked up to us. She kept crying. She just crawled on the floor crying.

So Pappou reached down with these hairy mitts he called hands, and grabbed her by the back of her jumpsuit and threw her onto his shoulder, and patted the back of her head and her back with these mitts.

He kept saying, "Oh, Athena, no cry, OK?"

But god bless Athena because she didn't stop crying. Not once, not even for a second.

No matter how tight Pappou held her or if he patter her or rocked her back and forth, Athen did not stop crying.

Not once.

Not even for a second.

But God bless Pappou, because no matter what, for those two hours that the women were out, Pappou never put down Athena. Never let her go.

Not once.

Not even for a second.

He wasn't a man of many words, but we all knew, we all knew this well, he was a man of a lot of love.

And he loved us. And Pappou, we loved you.

My word we did.

So if Pappou was here, not only would he be sad that we were all sad, but he'd yell out right about now, he'd say, "You know what Michael? You talk too much."

And he'd be right.

So I'm going to leave you with the words we printed this morning in the New York Daily News, in the most popular newspaper in the greatest city in the world. A city that he came to. He made it here, this poor boy from another country.

And I thank you Pappou for making it here, and making it so much easier for me.

This is what we printed, so this whole city can read, and know who Pappou was:

"KOTSIAS, Vasilios on January 14^th, 2008. Born in Kakavia, Greece.

Beloved family man, Vasilios Kotsias, passed away at 82 of natural causes.

He served as a banquet waiter at the New York Hilton for twenty-seven years, where he met every president from Lyndon Baines Johnson to William Jefferson Clinton.

His favorite hobbies included tending to his second home in Riverhead, NY, making frappes, and watching professional wrestling.

He had the most beautiful blue-grey eyes you'll ever see.

He is survived by wife, Andromahe, daughters, Athena and Evangelitsa, and grandchildren, Anastasia, Michael, Andromahe, Vasiliki, and Athena.

He was deeply loved. He really, really was."