Father’s Day: The Inheritance I Rewrote

My father died exactly 60 years after he was born.

I kept his notebooks. They are not travelogues, but intimate snapshots of the many places he and my mother visited when they were missionaries. They wrote of the people they met and the sermons he gave throughout the old South. It was all free. He relied on gratitude, kindness, and the hospitality of strangers, always repaying them with stories of hope and his gentle, unwavering belief that things were going to get better, "the end was coming soon."

He left home and became a preacher at sixteen. For the next 44 years, he believed deeply in his doctrine and spent his life bringing his hope to others. I grew up in that quiet faith—a world where kindness was assumed, where strength meant gentleness, where judgment of others was simply not an option for him. It was a protected thing. It shaped me in ways I didn't understand until I left it.

He died when I was in my mid-teens after a heart attack put him in the hospital for three days. During those last hours in ICU, he no longer recognized me. His arms reached out as if shaking hands with an invisible crowd. He nodded, smiled, and whispered words of comfort—not for himself, but for those he believed were gathered in front of him. His final sermon was not a plea for life but a benediction for others.

I think he may have been the kindest person on the planet. Perhaps that's why I take issue with that word. He preached that we never truly know someone else's struggles. That only God can judge another. He would probably be angry at me today because of some things I say. But his anger was never like mine. It was more like a gentle schooling.

What I didn't understand then, entering the real world alone, was how unprepared I would feel. I was angry for years, angry that I hadn't been hardened earlier, that the framework he gave me seemed so naive against what I encountered. People weren't kind. Strength didn't come from quietness. And kindness itself could be a mask for a dark soul.

I thought I had to reject everything to survive what came next.

Then I realized I was wrong about what he actually gave me. It wasn't a doctrine to defend. It was a different kind of strength—the ability to see even through distortion. The resilience to question everything (which became my way, not his) without becoming cynical. The capacity to recognize manipulation early because I'd been raised in such contrast to it.

His notebooks, bound with tape, wood, and cracked leather straps, are swollen with black-and-white photos, hand-scrawled letters, postcards from small towns, and notes of gratitude slipped into his hands by a stranger he comforted. To reconstruct his life, you have to read between the pages. You have to see a world shaped not just by faith, but by grief.

His parents and four brothers disowned him for his faith. His two-year-old daughter drowned while he stood just a few feet away. His first wife was killed by a distracted driver in a narrow alley. He was jailed briefly for preaching on the street. And then, ten years to the day after his death, my mother—his second wife—died trying to stop a physical fight between her friend and her friend's abusive husband.

During the same time, I was married to a man who, at first, seemed like a kind soul, like my father. It turned out that was only a performance of love. And it took me years to quietly get out or I might have met the same fate.

I rarely open the notebooks anymore. Most of the photos were lost in a flood. Funny the memories we have. I was very young, but I remember looking through the basement windows of the church, which is where we lived, and seeing our refrigerator floating. That silly image sticks in my brain today.

Long before I was born, they traveled across the country together, posing for photos of one another at roadside attractions and remote campsites. He would sketch her when she wasn't looking—quiet pencil drawings of her—the love of his life. I didn't grow up with violence or even a loud word. I grew up with this kind of love. I learned the other kinds of "love," or what seemed like love, later. From the outside world.

When I remember the dusty garage where I found his notebooks and hundreds of love letters between them, I also see the clutter of objects that also defined him: a ladder stained with paint, a flashlight wrapped in duct tape, jars filled with small rocks, antlers gifted by a small congregation in Sopchoppy, Florida.

And now, holding his books, I wonder—who are we when the people we love are gone? When I subtract him from my memories, what of me remains? His passing feels so distant now. But it's not the artifacts that I hold tight—it's the sound of his voice. The stories about the pigs living under their house in the Philippines. The tale of the headless chicken in Pennsylvania who survived the fry pot and lived out its life uneaten. The sanctity of nature even to the smallest creature. His easy acceptance of long-haired rock stars and the gay community—he'd smile and say, "It’s not ours to judge. It's what's in their heart that matters."

That's what I'm carrying forward—not the framework, but the practice of seeing people. He taught me to look for what's in someone's heart. Words that match actions. I see the circumstances that shaped them, the pain they carry, the reasons behind their choices. And I don't confuse that understanding with acceptance of their behavior now. We all have a past, but you choose how you live today.

I'm not as kind as he was. The world he moved through was brutal, and he chose gentleness anyway. But he was never silent. The world I move through demands something else from me sometimes—anger, yes. A willingness to speak up. But that’s not in my nature day-to-day, just as it wasn't in his at all. Most of the time I'm a quiet observer. Until something happens I can't ignore.

A gentle person knows the past is just a place he's been;
True kindness isn't spoken words, it’s rising from within.
It’s choosing to look past the hurt, to break a bitter chain,
And offering another grace instead of giving pain.