Jerry Michael Crowley

A visitation for Jerry will be held Sunday, March 24, 2024 from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM at Demaine Funeral Home, 5308 Backlick Road, Springfield, VA 22151. A gathering will occur Sunday, March 24, 2024 from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM, 5308 Backlick Road, Springfield, VA 22151. A funeral mass will occur Monday, March 25, 2024 from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM at Queen of Apostles Catholic Church, 4401 Sano St, Alexandria, VA 22312.

A celebration of life will be held afterward at PJ Skidoos in Fairfax.

My beloved, tender and truly saintly father — my daddy, he would have insisted, of course — returned to his true mother, the Virgin Mary, yesterday two weeks after a cancer diagnosis. He was 81 and lived a magnificent life with all the joy and pain that we should embrace in decades on this earth.

Jerry Michael Crowley was born in Watertown, N.Y., on July 17, 1942. He was a three-sport athlete in the tiny hamlet of Adams Center with a heart of gold and a big brain that led him to the University of Notre Dame, from which he graduated in 1964 — the spring Ara Parseghian was hired (his class endured the worst four-year football record in Fighting Irish history, something he was none too pleased about). After graduation, Dad went to OCS in Newport, R.I., and was shipped to San Diego for service aboard the USS Galveston, and he saw the world — including service in Vietnam — before coming to Arlington in 1969 to work in the Navy’s JAG office.

Dad spent much of his career working at USAA because it is a family-friendly company so he could spend time with his children and support my mother’s dream to break out of dresses and heels to become a telephone lineman at a time when that wasn’t really a woman’s job. Mr. Mom made my brother and me popcorn or chocolate pudding on Friday nights while we watched “The Dukes of Hazzard” before bedtime, when the real magic began. For years, he used his expressive imagination to regale us with tales of the Huckleberry Family (Beauty, Cutie Pie, Bozo and Ziggy) as they had their adventures in the Rainbow Bus with their neighbor, Herkimer HubbaBubba, and their friends Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe. Every night he would start by asking, “Now where did we leave off?”

The day before I started my internship at The Post, he took me for a walk in the woods and quizzed me on different news scenarios and asked me to come up with a headline for the story before driving me down 66 to E Streetand finally to 15th as a dry run because he didn’t want me to get lost on my first day.

Dad was hospitalized and in hospice for two short weeks but had 30 visitors, including two from church who had recently moved and drove in from Ohio just for him. While they were here, they noticed a friend missing from Mass, went to her house to check on her and saw she was in distress. They got her to the ER and they found she was having a stroke. Their visit to Dad saved that 87-year-old woman’s life. That is peak Jerry.

Dad has always been a devout Catholic who attended Mass every day and, as a sacristan at Queen of Apostles in Alexandria, he would be present at 2 a.m. each month to await candle delivery. He was devoted to family and loved us more than anything, especially his grandson, Devan. But he also had one helluva sense of humor. He loved to tell jokes and would always start one with, “I’ve got a story to tell you … “ 😂

Thank the Lord for March Madness. College hoops and morphine kept his pain largely at bay in the past week, but after his Dukies lost to UNC the other night, I think he was prepared to return home and passed peacefully.

In his last coherent words, he asked, “Courtney?! Why am I here??” I calmly told him, “Daddy, you have cancer and you’re here to go home. God, Jesus and Mary are coming for you soon. And I promise you there will be no purgatory. You are getting the express pass to St. Peter.” He smiled, calmly closed his eyes, and went, “Ahhhhhh, paradise.”

What a great man and life, and what a way to go. ❤️