Birth date: May 16, 1943 Death date: Dec 8, 2025
Born on May 16, 1943, in El Paso, Texas, Adin was the first son of U.S. Army Major James Robert Hyslop and Mildred Teresa Woods. He grew up in the border town of Del Rio, sharing a busy home with his parents, grandmother, two youn Read Obituary
Liz, Bill, Jim, and Adin
Celebration of Life, by William Hyslop
To celebrate his life, I am very happy to offer a couple of stories because we had a wonderful childhood together… with great family bonds and family love. We were 3 brothers and a little sister. Our childhood and early adulthood were in small towns, during the early 1950’s to the early 1970’s. Looking back, that was a wonderful age of simplicity, a time with no devices, barely any TV, so safe that we never locked doors and most all our fun was with activities outside our home.
We played football in our large side yard, rode our bikes all over town from early morning until dusk on Saturdays, played red rover, red rover with our friends at night or chased as many lighting bugs as we could catch to put into empty milk bottles. We were experts with yoyo’s and at spinning tops and playing marbles. We were all very competitive, but it was a lot of fun.
Our dad was a doctor, who sometimes took us fishing, and our mom was a stay-at-home mom. They both were wonderful loving parents who cared deeply about us and our family. We were a close-knit family.
Now, it wasn’t all fun and games because with 3 brothers, there was usually some disagreements and fighting. Once, the three of us were banned from our regular barber shop, because we were much too rowdy for their other clientele. This did not go over well with our mother because from then on, only one of us could get a haircut at a time while the other two waited in the car for our turn. But, for me, in those days, being the youngest, it was a great childhood because I got to “tag along” with my older brothers.
We were all very close.
Adin was the oldest; thus, he was our de facto leader or “boss” … meaning for me, the littler brother, I was Adin’s personal slave. I always had to change the TV channels, or make him sandwiches, but he wasn’t a bully to us, he just liked having his own personal slave. That was my first lesson in humility. Oddly, as a result, I looked up to Adin out of love not fear.
Adin was mischievous at times. There are too many stories to tell. But one time when we were little kids, Adin told Jim and me that any body part exposed from under our sheet at night would be cut off by “Chop Chop Charlie”. Without air conditioning that summer, it was hot under those sheets.
But Adin was also my protector. If I had any problems with neighborhood boys, he was always there to take care of me. I remember on my second day at Peacock Military Academy as a new and confused freshman, one of the upper classmen was pushing me around …. things that happens in all boys’ schools… and suddenly Adin appeared out of nowhere and, as they say, showed him why he should never mess with me again. And he never did.
Adin was also my friend…well, as much as a big brother would allow. He would frequently come to my little league baseball games when no one else in my family came and he always sat near the third base fence so that I knew where to look for him. I remember… the one time, in my whole little league career, that I hit a home run, it was a game he had missed. I was so disappointed. His presence at my games was special to me.
Adin was also Mr. Fix it. He loved to take apart or fix anything that was broken. When he got his first car, he was always under the hood working on it, changing the points and plugs or setting its timing. One time when my Volkswagen beetle had a very loud hole in the muffler, Adin told me to get it fixed. Well, I didn’t have enough money so, Adin, on his own, bought me a new muffler and then he spent a whole day trying to figure out how to pull the old one out and put the new one in. Of course, he did it and he never asked me for money. When I thanked him, he only said the pleasure was his…meaning, he enjoyed the challenge and figuring out how to do it. That was Adin.
At a Christmas dinner, Adin was nowhere around when we were ready to eat. Looking around the neighborhood, I found him about 10 houses down the block helping some guy he had just met work on his car. That was Adin.
To conclude, let me just say that Adin was a humble person, never wanting attention. He was the kind of “yes man” we loved, because he always said yes when we asked something from him. He was the proverbial “welcome mat” because he was always so glad to see us when we visited. He was both a brilliant scientist and a fine family man. He was unique. God threw away the mold after he made Adin.
While I was collecting my thoughts for what to say today and looking at old photos of us, I felt a profound sense of loss…now that he is gone…, but I’m not sad. I know that our Lord Jesus Christ is giving him beautiful peace and happiness in his Kingdom and that he is enjoying being with our mom and dad, with Celia and Joe and together, experiencing Christ’s amazing Love.
Finally, in his last decade of life, Adin was so blessed to have Pamela and Mikey in his life. Pamela, Mikey, he told me that many times.
Homily
from Trevor Hyslop (son)
I’d like to open with a direct quote from Adin. When Adin wanted my sisters and I to hurry, he’d always say, “Motivate! Exponentiate!” … Let me say it again: Motivate! Exponentiate! You see, this is a math joke… and not just any math joke, but a dad math joke… more specifically, an Adin dad math joke. It’s like Buzz Light Year in the movie Toy Story, when he says: To infinity and beyond! It symbolizes endless exploration, loving one another, and pursuing boundless dreams.
In Dad’s case, instead of saying “Ok kids let’s go.” He’d say “Motivate! Exponentiate!” If we were running late, or just waking up for school, or about to go on another 2000-mile family road trip, he’d say: “Motivate! Exponentiate!” Go on, say it after me on 3. 1-2-: Motivate! Exponentiate! One more time on 3, 1-2- Motivate! Exponentiate!
I’d like to thank you all for coming. Many of you are from out of town, and while I know you sure didn’t drive 2000 miles like Adin always did, I know he’d very much appreciate you all being here. So, thank you.
We’re gathered here today to celebrate Adin Edwin Hyslop, my dad, for a life well-lived. And while we are all filled with sadness in his passing, I want to share that Dad confided in me one time that he was a little scared of death, much like all of us are. And that’s ok. Dad said he believed death should also be a happy thing… that death is when the adventure really begins.
When I visited Bali many years ago, I stayed in village with a family who just welcomed their newly born baby into the world. I noticed that the baby was never placed on the floor nor on the ground, but instead gently passed along and held by the family. And when I asked my host, why? …he told me that it’s because in Hindu custom the first few months of life must be treated gently to ensure the new spirit is eased into the world. That a spirit is closest to the gods, first right after it’s born, and then last shortly before the body dies... He also told me the farthest the spirit is from the gods is during middle age when it has a job and a mortgage.
Adin is now with God, and as we celebrate this remarkable human being, my sisters and I would like to share a few memories of him, that make us smile, and that defined who he was as a man and as a father.
from Brie Hyslop (daughter)
The stories we share reflect a life that was committed to creativity, authenticity, the pursuit of passion: one that explored black holes and infinite space of light and dark between stars. My dad dove deep and pulled his children along with him.
My dad was eccentric. As curious as he was, he was also tender, sincere and fiercely loyal to his children. I was born, weighing 2 pounds 3 oz. Because my mom had a fever, she wasn’t the first person to touch me. My dad was. For the next two months, while I lived inside my incubator, my dad stood watch over my tiny life.
I had a tube in my nose and an IV in my head. My dad would reach through the plastic, stroke my transparent skin and rest his palm on my belly, watching it rise and fall with each breath. And as I breathed, he did the same. Willing me to be strong, to live against all odds.
When I was finally brought home, my dad proudly marched around the house saying “Look—her head and her butt fits into the palm of my hand. She is so tiny and so strong.”
He knew each of his children deeply, and his attention was deliberate. When I would say “Dad look at me” He’d count the pull ups as I hung from the doorway siding, always encouraging “just one more.”
My high energy childhood left him puzzled as I found a way to climb onto the roof without a ladder and jump off unscathed. My mom yelled “catch her,” my dad, while watering the lawn would calmly say “I don’t need to.”
He taught me how to ride a bike in his own calculated way. He took off one training wheel, the right one. So, while the neighborhood kids turned right to round the block, I had no option but lean into my one training wheel and turn left.
My dad loved boats. He loved sailing. As a teenager, I remember him saying, “If Einstein had just learned to sail…” And launching into an explanation of raw power and simple kinetics connecting wind and water to deeper physics I didn’t fully understand, I believed my dad was onto something extraordinary. Later, I learned Einstein did learn to sail and he loved it—and like my dad, Einstein was terrible at it. My dad and Einstein ran aground, capsized, broke masts, ignored danger and refused life jackets. My dad always fell off the boat, lose his glasses and yell at us to take the rudder and duck under the boom.
Sailing for my dad and Einstein was a form of meditation in motion — a way to find solitude and calm the mind, allowing for creative ideas to emerge about nature about the laws of the universe.
This love brought him to Antarctica: the driest coldest windiest continent on earth. He packed jeans. Layer upon layer of jeans and his beloved blue boat shoes with the holes in the soles.
In Antarctica, my dad thrived: on an icebreaker named the Nathaniel B. Palmer. My dad was proud to be on a research boat, even more content to be on the bridge of the boat, staring into fractals of ice, deep clear water, and the darkest of skies.
He returned with a light in his spirit and one souvenir. A Nathaniel B. Palmer hat that was part was his uniform. This hat was the X on the spot of a treasure map. The spot was his heart forever embedded in the ice of the South Pole.
Years later, when I needed a hat for a backpacking trip through Yosemite, he took it from his mantle and placed it on my head with one condition: I was not to lose it.
I lost it. At the base of Yosemite Falls, during a lunar rainbow, the hat swept off my head into the Merced River and as I was about to leap in after it, a stranger grabbed me by the waist and yelled “Are you crazy?” …I yelled back “No, but my dad is!”
As eccentric as my dad was, he was also creative, a dreamer, a thinker, a problem solver. He taught his children not just to live… but to dive deep, to follow through with passion and adventure no matter how odd or how extreme.
Amanda Hyslop (daughter), It’s Okay to Be Strange
When I think of a memory of my dad that makes me feel close to him, I come back to one strange moment from when I was a little girl.
I was in our kitchen in Houston, my bare feet on the cold linoleum floor. I don’t know exactly how old I was, but I know the top of my head barely reached halfway up the counters. On the counter sat raw hamburger meat, still in the shape it came in, like a small loaf, squat and heavy, wrapped in thin plastic that clung to it.
When my dad unwrapped it, the hamburger meat looked soft and woven, like pink, red ribbons pressed together. It sagged a little under its own weight, glossy and wet, and when he touched it, it gave way easily, squishing and reshaping itself in his hands, soft, gooey, and compelling to a curious little kid. I think the Gen Z calls this ASMR.
I stood right beside him like a dog, and as Brie likes to say, he fed me the raw meat. I tasted raw hamburger for the first time, and I LOVED it (which feels very Texan of me, honestly). My dad was amused by how much I loved it, probably because he loved meat too, and saw a little of himself in me. It was strange, not exactly a parenting book recommendation, to give your kid raw beef. But anyone who knew my dad knows that he did strange things.
He did things differently than was expected; he went off script, didn't always follow the rules, and didn't care to impress. And growing up with him taught me this: strange isn't always bad, sometimes strange is just another word for being curious, or brave, or even being honest, paying attention to what you like (like the raw meat), even when the world tells you that you shouldn't.
Another thing my dad loved besides meat was coffee. Folgers, specifically. Two days after he passed, I woke up in the middle of the night and smelled Folgers coffee. No coffee was brewing. No reason for it to be there. But there it was, his coffee. His smell. His way of showing me he was there. My brother, Trev, thinks Folgers instant coffee is gross. And honestly, it probably is. It’s not fancy. It’s not Starbucks. I didn't even think people drank Folgers anymore.
But I saw Folgers K-Cups in the grocery store the other day on the bottom shelf, and it stopped me in my tracks because suddenly, there he was again.
Lately, it’s been hard to think about him. I think it’s the grief. I don’t want to admit to myself that he’s really gone. I talk to friends and family, and they remind me that he’s still around in other ways. And part of me believes that.
I like to think he’s gone back to the stars—that he’s still part of whatever makes us who we are.
After he was cremated, we walked out of Restland, and I saw a ladybug. At the same time, my mom saw a butterfly. I think we both thought the same thing: maybe that’s him. A butterfly and a ladybug don’t seem like the spirit animals he would have chosen for himself. Who knows? But I felt him. And maybe that’s all that matters.
My dad loved coffee. He loved meat. He loved quietly. He loved steadily. He loved without trying to change people. With him, you could be your strange, curious, off-script self and still feel safe, still feel seen. And I grew up knowing this: even if you are different, even if you do unusual things, you still get to be loved and held exactly as you are. That has been such an enlightened gift.
Trevor Hyslop (son)
Like my sisters mentioned, Adin’s presence in our lives can be found everywhere in the world.
There’s a story about a wise, old Taoist sage in ancient China who lived in a hut high in the mountains. One day some of the Confucianists in the village below were having a conflict and decided it best to pay a visit to this sage, for after all he was said to be the wisest of all sages and could certainly help provide a solution to this conflict.
Now, Confucianists were said to be deeply religious and strict, and they made the long trek up the mountain, to the sage’s hut. And when they got there, they peered inside and found him meditating, alone… and completely naked! Surprised by this, and a little angry, they burst into his hut and started shouting at him: “How could this be?! You are supposed to be a wise, religious sage and you’re defiling our religion, what’s wrong with you? …sitting here naked in your hut, no pants.”
And then the sage answered back: “The entire world is my hut… and this building is my pants. My question to you is: What are you doing inside my pants?!”
Adin loved this story. I think Dad was a little like that sage. It’s quite an amazing thing how with death there is both less of someone, and yet more of them in the world around.
Dad loved the moon and the stars. When my sisters and I were in elementary school, there was excitement everywhere about Halley’s Comet. It appears only once every 80 years, first recorded in 250 BC, and Dad was absolutely determined that we were not going to miss it.
For weeks, he told us everything about it—how it was named after Edmond Halley, how it was 4.6 billion years old, made of rock, frozen gases, carbon dioxide, and methane. He explained that most people would see it with their eyes, but we would have a much better experience, because he was going to show it to us through his own state-of-the-art telescope with special lenses he assembled specifically for the comet’s distance and speed. He even hand-drew a map showing where we’d go to avoid city lights, including alternate routes in case of traffic.
Dad’s excitement was contagious. I bragged to my friends at school that my dad was taking us to see Halley’s Comet—with the best customized telescope ever built, one he built himself!
The night before, he sent us to bed early so we could wake up before dawn. This was our one chance. He set his alarm for 3 a.m.
At 4 a.m., Dad burst into our rooms yelling that he’d overslept and we had to hurry—but it was okay, we could still make it. We raced into the van and peeled out of the driveway… only to realize a mile later that he’d forgotten the telescope!
So, we turned around, grabbed it, and raced back onto the freeway, Dad still talking excitedly about how lucky we were to be alive to see this.
We finally reached the exact spot on his map—but the parking lot was full. Everyone in Houston had the same idea. We parked nearby, ran into a grassy field, and Dad frantically assembled the telescope. The tripod wouldn’t cooperate, so he found a piece of wood to steady it.
He peered into the eyepiece and said, “Ok kids, wait… wait…”
Then he yelled, “Goddamnit! The ocular lens is broken!”
Undeterred, he said we’d have to see it with our naked eyes—but this wasn’t the best spot. Consulting his map, he said he knew another place. So, we ran back to the van, drove again, and ended up—somehow—in an apartment complex. Dad was lost, though he never admitted it.
By then, dawn was breaking. The sun was rising. Halley’s Comet had come and gone. Dad was devastated. Head down, he kept saying, “I ruined it. Everything. I failed.”
You might think he did too—but you’d be wrong.
Because what we realized, even then, was that seeing the comet wasn’t the point. What mattered was the preparation. The excitement. The passion. The way Dad invited us into something bigger than ourselves. By the time we reached that apartment complex, we already knew Halley’s Comet. We had experienced it—through him.
We learned about wonder. Curiosity. Persistence. And love.
That was who our dad was. A man who believed life wasn’t complicated—that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. That the purpose of being here is to love well.
I think Dad would want us to ask ourselves: How well am I loving? How well did I love? Can I bring compassion, empathy and joy into a messy, imperfect world? If we can do that, then like Halley’s Comet, his light hasn’t passed at all. It’s still here—moving through us.
So, as we leave this service today and return to our lives and routines, I’d like us to remember something.
First: “Motivate, Exponentiate!” But more importantly I’d like us to remember a message about our humanity… of meeting everyone in the world without judgement, but with respect, equanimity, loving-kindness and compassion, values Adin held dear. It’s a quote from one of my favorites, the Christian mystic and poet, Thomas Merton.
“Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes.
If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way, all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose then, the only thing left would be for each of us to kneel down and bow to one another with love.”
from Elizabeth Hyslop:
My earliest memory as a child of Adin and my brothers was in Del Rio outside our home playing marbles, pick up sticks, and jacks. But it really didn't get interesting until Adin got his toy chest out and pulled out his coveted army
men, then everything got more exciting. I'm not sure why those were a hit, they never did anything. But it was fun.
Anytime Adin played a practical joke on me, it would almost always involve a more complicated process than just simply jumping out and saying boo. For example, one time he made the dolls I had lined up on my bed, move by themselves. He had somehow taken thin electrical wire out of an older recorder that my father used. He attached the wire to the dolls, then up through the window, where from outside he would pull on the wires and the dolls would move ever so slightly or fall down. I don't remember if he could put it all back together before my father found out, but knowing Adin he probably did, likely with improvements to the original design.
Adin was the oldest of my older brothers, 7 years older. He taught me how to drive a car and even gave me one of his old cars. He taught me how to water ski. He was very patient teaching me these skills. He was even bold enough to give me a music album, not a tame album, but Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced album. I loved it. The next year he bought me one of those extra large bottles of champagne for my high school graduation gift. It made my father frown. He was always coming up with surprises for me.
During high school, our marching girls team was asked to perform as the half- time entertainment at the Cotton Bowl during a Dallas Cowboys game. As we marched off the field at the end of halftime, there was Adin in the stands right above where we exited so I couldn't miss him cheering me on. He was my biggest cheerleader. And I
will always love him for that.
He was born first and helped guide me, through this life. And now he has died first and I know he will be there to guide me in our afterlife. Look forward to seeing you then.
Deeply grateful for everyone's attendance. With love, The Hyslop Family
Remembering you, Adin, for the best and most joyful Christmas (2023) you spent with us—your family from California.
Your presence, love, and care will never be forgotten.
Thank you for everything you have done for us. We love you, Adin. You are truly one of a kind! 🙏🏻
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen."
