Father’s Day and Loss

There’s a silence that echoes within me every Father’s Day. A silence shaped by absence, grief, gratitude, and legacy.

When I lost my father, I was 20 years old, and had just come out of the Army. I got to see him once, maybe twice before he was taken from us. I had grandiose dreams of sitting with him as a man. Talking to him as a man. Arguing with him as a man. A man who had defied him as a boy of 17, and convinced him into coming over to our home — he and my mother were separated — to meet with a Recruiter and sign papers to allow me to inscribe myself into the Army. Looking back, I would do it again. It was necessary. I did it for me, not for family. I did it for me, not for honor. I did it for me, not for legacy. I did it to escape an abusive mother, and a level of poverty that had promised to cage me like a bird, already muted and unable to sing. His death was brutal to all of us, but for me it triggered that moment of betrayal 3 years and 6 months prior, on a cold Atlanta January in 1983. I remember him asking why I was going into the Army, “Because I want to go to college.” I said, and watched him shake his head, but capitulate, because he saw that I was right, despite it all. I was aware of my peoples History, but knew only slightly my Father's distaste for the Military, based off of his own dealings and our Nations History. Despite my hate for the loss, and the pain it caused me, in retrospect, his death was catalytic. It broke something inside me. It forced me to become the man I was meant to be, even more so than my service in the Army and as an Army Paratrooper. I became even more driven, and a bit psychotic as well. I lost myself in what I had learned in the Airborne. I lost myself in pain and discipline in order to find myself. Of course I had stopped being the 17 year old who gone into the Army to escape, and get money for school shortly after my enlistment, but what I hadn't counted on was that I was still Pork Chops son ---- Pork Chop or Poke or Chop was the nickname my father went by.

My father lived through a world I can only partially understand, because despite any racism I have suffered and lived through, mine was not a world where Civil Rights weren’t guaranteed. Mine was not a world where dignity was something you had to carve out for yourself against the grain of society. His worldview was shaped by survival, not sentiment. He saw the Army differently. He saw America differently. And in his eyes, that is why my enlistment was both a betrayal and a hope. We didn’t  see eye to eye in that regard, its understandable. He wanted more for me when he asked my why the Military, he just didn’t know how to provide it.

Anyway, I’m getting too far into my feelings for one when,  Father’s Day for me isn’t just about him. It’s a lineage I have to honor for all who have graced me with their time in my life to help me become me.

I think about the men in my bloodline—Great-Grandfathers, Grandfathers, Uncles—men who taught me what to do, and sometimes more importantly, what not to do. Some were present, steady as stone. Some were absent but loud in their silence. I learned from their labor, their laughter, their violence, their gentleness, their pride, and their pain. They were fractured mirrors that somehow taught me how to reflect wholeness. I’m still working on that, and probably will be until I take my last breath.

Then there’s the loss that still aches with every breath—my wife. Her death some 4 1/2 years ago now cut me in ways I still can’t describe. There were days I didn’t recognize myself. There were nights I didn’t want to. Her absence was a wound I carried quietly. I went full Airborne in a way, mimicking the way I reacted when my Chop was taken. But in time, that pain gave birth to something else—purpose. A deeper, sharper purpose. I became more than a man in mourning; I became a father forged in fire, dedicated to ensuring my daughter's futures, emotionally (I lack in that department still) and financially. Their future became my compass.

So on this day, I honor the losses that built me. I honor the brokenness that made me whole. I honor the men in my ancestry who endured emasculation, legislation, segregation—and still managed to hold their heads high, even when the law didn’t recognize them as fully human until the year of my birth: 1965.

I am not the product of comfort. I am the echo of perseverance. I welcome the suffering. Because nothing I have faced is harder than what those men endured with no complaint, no justice, no safety net. They were giants. And I walk their path now—not with fear, but with fire in my heart. My chest out. My head high!

To the fathers still here—thank you. To the ones who left too soon—we remember. To the men who taught through example, pain, or absence—you shaped us. And to those of us still learning—grace and strength to you.

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Agustín El Moro