Bryan KingGoodbye Dad – One Year Later
Dad,
One year ago today I stood on that Tennessee hillside in dress shoes that had no business being in red clay looking down at the old pond that overflowed on the papaw King’s properity. Josh, Jason, Eason, the two funeral-home guys, and me—six of us carried you from the hurst to the grave site. Your casket was heavier than any server I’ve ever racked, heavier than anything I carried on one of your job sites, heavier than every line of code I’ve ever shipped to keep the lights on. When we lowered you on those ropes, my palms burned the same way yours must have after a twelve-hour day of framing houses.
I’ve been a programmer now for over twenty-seven years, counting down the last seven until retirement. I sit in quiet rooms under fluorescent lights and wrestle invisible bugs while most people sleep, just like you wrestled 2x4s from dawn till you couldn’t see the nail. Different battlefield, same fight: keep the family safe, keep the roof paid for, try to build something that outlasts me.
After work and on weekends, in whatever free time I can steal, I write for the internet—blogs, mostly. I try to tell people how good God really is, how wide Jesus’ love actually reaches, and how so many who claim to speak for Him get it wrong.
Five hundred and eighty miles north, one whiff of fresh-cut pine still puts me right back in the passenger seat of that black 1980 F-150, sawdust on the dash, you singing off-key to some country song while we bounced down backroads through a dozen little towns in Tennessee and Kentucky headed to or from a job site, or through a dozen little towns in Ohio chasing yard sales for furniture you’d fix up and flip on the weekends.
Some nights I still wake up at 3 a.m. with my fists clenched, feeling those ropes paying out, hearing the clods of clay hit the lid as we covered you ourselves. I needed to be one of the six, Dad. Needed these soft programmer hands to do one hard, real thing for you. Because for every promise you couldn’t keep, I got to keep the only one that still mattered: I helped lay you down with honor, on the family ground, right beside your brother and sister.
I remember the letter you sent me at Fort Jackson when I was nineteen and drowning in Basic Training—failing push-ups, getting smoked every morning, sure I’d ruined my life. Your shaky handwriting showed up in mail call: “I’m proud of you, son.” I sat on my bunk and read it until the paper went soft from sweat and tears. One of the only times I ever cried in the Army, and the only time anybody saw it. Those words carried me through the rest of those ten weeks and a lot of hard days after. I never said thank you. Consider this my very late reply.
The past has been coming back in two different ways.
Some of it is the stories you told after I moved away—things you said to customers, co-workers, some of my old friends—things that made me look smaller or stranger than I was. Most of what I have heard was gossip you told around a work site or at the lumber yard. Years later those stories still drift north like bad packets that never got dropped. Some days they sting. Some days I just feel sad for all of us.
The other part is older, deeper: things a kid shouldn’t have to carry. Things I buried so deep they left giant blank spots in my memory. They’re coming up now in slow, jagged pieces that don’t always fit together yet. I may never see the whole picture, but I’ve seen enough to know the good wasn’t the whole story.
Truth is, both the good and the bad had their moments. There were mornings you were the best dad a kid could ask for, and there were nights the house felt too small for all of us. I’m learning to hold them both without letting either one own me.
Here’s what I need you to hear, Dad, and I need it to be crystal clear: Whatever else rises—every harsh word, every repeated rumor, every memory still hiding in the dark—I’m choosing to forgive it all. I’m laying every ounce of that weight down on that Tennessee hillside, right beside the coffin we lowered.
You don’t have to carry it anymore; I choose not to carry it any more, either.
In that last private phone conversation—when dementia briefly lifted its fog and gave you back to me—you spoke clearly into the receiver, looked through the distance as if you could see me, and said, “They’re claiming I said things I never did.” You spent your final lucid breath defending me, my wife, my daughter. I wish to God you’d said it years sooner, when it could have spared us some scars, but I understand why you waited. You said it when it counted most, and that single line rewrote everything. Best code you ever wrote, Dad—clean, honest, shipped at the absolute last second. Bug fixed. Heart patched.
So tonight I’m raising a beer to you in a city you never saw, in a life that would’ve looked like science fiction to you. I’m still writing code so my girl—who’s in college now and doesn’t care much for fishing—can chase whatever dream she wants without ever looking over her shoulder at the bills. I’m doing my damnedest to keep every promise I make to her and my wife. In an odd way, I learned that from you.
You’re home now. Hammer down. Boots off. Rest easy on the ground that you grew up on with your brother on one side and your sister on the other.
I’ll keep writing clean code until the day I retire, God willing. I’ll keep writing about grace in my free time.
I love you, Dad.
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Johanny Ortega
