Greg Aguirre, Welcome Home

Funerals are never easy. And we’ve all been in that place whether we debate going or not. The temperatures were in the mid-90s at 5 p.m. on a sweltering Monday in July as I deliberated whether to go. I imagined a half-empty room with no air conditioning and how it would be to try and breathe in that miserable heat.

When I got to the funeral home in San Gabriel, it looked very welcoming and comfortable. The cold air hit me when I entered the front door, and my stress and anxiety dropped quickly. The attendant directed me to the correct room, and I entered the packed but very comfortable chapel, which I knew in a second was the only place on Earth I should be.

I was here to say goodbye to retired Supervising Public Response Dispatcher Greg Aguirre, who had suddenly passed away a few weeks earlier. It immediately struck me that if I were the one who had passed, he would not have thought twice about attending.

I found a seat close to the front, which I appreciated, and there were enlarged photos of Greg in his Sheriff’s Department uniform. He looked so happy and very proud to be wearing the LASD uniform.

I first met Greg in the summer of 1986 when I was hired as an RTO/Sheriff’s Dispatch. I could immediately see how polite and serious Greg was about his work and about maintaining healthy and positive connections with his co-workers. This is not an easy task at the “radio room,” where oftentimes, he would be working a shift where there would be 15 dispatchers, a supervisor or two and him, and he would be the only male in the room. He was the only man in the whole building many times. While he may not have admitted it, he definitely enjoyed it.

Greg was hired as a dispatcher in 1983, and after promoting to Supervising PRD, he retired in February 2022. When you spend every day for 35-plus years with the same people, it’s hard not to forge bonds with people, many of them as close as family or even closer. For much of Greg’s life, his family away from work was quite small. That was until two of his co-workers learned he was adopted and encouraged him (they admit it was more like they had to put him in a headlock to extract his DNA), but he got hits back from ancestry.com, and in the final years of his life, he was united with close and distant relatives who he never knew existed. They were so happy to meet him, and he was equally thrilled.

I worked up the courage to get up and talk at Greg’s memorial, and I shared how much fun he had at work and how playful he was with the female-filled room at work. I recounted how he loved to announce to the women whenever deputies would pull into the parking lot. He would announce to “bring out the lipstick and mascara, ladies,” and loved watching his single co-workers grabbing for their purses and compacts.

I thought about how Greg’s moment of death quickly shifted to that moment when he met all the relatives in his life who had passed and all the deputy sheriffs whose lives he saved by remaining calm and cool as they spent their lives protecting the citizens of L.A. County. I can see him high-fiving them at the Pearly Gates. I imagined him greeting all his former SRC dispatchers who preceded him to paradise — Brenda, Dean, Gary, Virgie … and too many to list or recall.

Greg was raised Catholic and believed in God, so I knew he would appreciate the poem that was read at the recent funeral of General Colin Powell. While speaking at Greg’s memorial, I shared verse three of “Rough Side of the Mountain” from Reverend FC Barnes:

“This old race will soon be over,
there’ll be no more race for me to run.
And I will stand before God’s throne,
all my heartaches will be gone,
I’ll hear my Savior say, “Welcome home.”

I then told the mourners, who, like me, were so sad that Greg left us so soon: “Everyone be really quiet … listen really carefully, don’t make a sound, and you might hear our savior say, “Greg … welcome home.”