Hero in the Shadows

To my father…

I need to thank you. You have given me more than I have ever realized.

I see it everyday when I look in the mirror and see your face staring back at me as I age. I see it in my daughter’s steel-blue eyes that she got from you. But most of all, I see it as I look back on my life and reflect on the men who helped shaped me in your absence.

If you had never divorced my mom, I never would have gotten to know Mr. Bryce. He was the older church custodian who saw a semi-fatherless boy and took it upon himself to take me fishing. I also would have missed out on the depth of influence that the men in our church had on me as a child. I looked at men like Mr. Jim, Mr. Alan, and Mr. Dennis as role models and each of them treated me like their own child.

All that I wanted was a dad.

As I grew into my teenage years, I would meet Mark, and Bradley, and Bill. Those three men helped to shape the direction I took my career. I found that in connecting with men that I respected the most, I just wanted to do for others what they had done for me. Each of them challenged me in different ways. And they each showed me profound love that I so needed.

I spent twenty years filling in the gaps of our relationship with the spackle I could get from these men. But none of them could truly be what I needed them to be. So, I decided that I needed to be that thing myself for others. And perhaps then, I could feel whole again.

So I volunteered to mentor, shepherd, and show genuine love to a group of high school guys. I spent my first two years of college pouring into their lives on a weekly basis. We hung out, we shared meals together, and we became genuine friends. And in late May of 2005, we hopped on a bus with a few hundred others in East Tennessee and traveled to Colorado to spend a week together in the Rocky Mountains.

It was a two-day bus ride that included a stop at Six Flags in St. Louis. But when we pulled into the gate at the ranch camp, all the work of the past two years, and all of the heartbreak of the past twenty, came together in what was set to be the greatest week of all of our lives.

And then I got the call…

The demon of alcohol that had controlled your life for so long, the one that caused most of the pain I had felt over the course of my life from you, had taken its final payment.

There was such a mixture of emotions in that moment for me. Relief that no one else was hurt. Anger that I had to leave this place and this experience I had worked so hard for; one last thing that you took from me. Curiosity about what would come next. But what wasn’t there, at least initially, was sadness.

Your death was a crossroad for me. It remains a marker in my life that I can point to as a pivot point. After that, I was no longer working to win your love or attention. Instead, I was determined to become the antithesis of everything that I thought you were. And I would continue to find men to look up to and follow as a means of what I hoped to become.

Men like Damon, who taught me that gentleness and encouragement are two of the most powerful things you can offer others. Men like Marko, who taught me that having an identity build upon values and vision is critical to accomplishing anything of worth. Men like Don, whom I don’t know personally, who taught me that we are meant to live incredible stories, but many of us simply choose the path of least resistance.

But the biggest thing that came as a result of your death, was a realization that the man I needed in my life, had been there for quite some time. My mom had remarried when I was seven. But I always kept my step-father at arms distance. I didn’t need a “dad.” I had one, even as broken as he was. My stubbornness was no match for this man’s love for my mom, that became a love for our family. He was going to raise me the best way he knew how regardless of how much I fought him at every turn.

So when I look in the mirror and see your face, and when I see your eyes in my daughter’s, it’s undeniable that I have you in me. But, when I look at who I am as a husband and a father, I see so much more of him in me.

Wisdom comes with age because it is built upon a foundation of perspective. When I look back over my life, I can see that I only ever had one dad, and we don’t share any DNA.