daddy:

it’s been five years since we laid you to rest. it seems surreal to type this — all that time, lost in a blink.

so many things have happened.

everyone is okay. mom, michael, angie, ted and me; we’re all doing alright, hanging in there. (maybe they’ve already written you letters of their own.)

momma is doing really good. she still practices piano and volunteers at the church food bank on the weekends. she gets lonely in that big empty house, she said; last christmas was hard for her. i’ll spend christmas with her this year. she’ll be 80 in January — she wants to take that cruise to Alaska again.

i’ve been working harder than ever. maybe too hard. after decades of making music that you didn’t care for — “people pay for this?!” you once asked in astonishment —- i’ve been making a lot of music that you might even like. i’ve been on TV quite a bit recently, playing with a great singer named Brittany Howard. (You’d love her — if you met her, she’d remind you a lot of a young Grandma Irene.) you never got to hear my band KINFOLK, but the band has grown so much since we started back in 2013. i’m not sure you would have liked the entire album, but i think you would’ve been proud to see my name on the CD cover. (you and mom’s voices are featured on the album. remember that interview about Granddaddy?)

as i get older, i can’t deny that i inherited your relentless work ethic, and your compulsive creativity. (as well as mom’s lifelong fascination with reading and writing) i remember you were always working, always busy doing something, making something. i remember your sketchbooks, the repository for your imagination, filled with all of the ideas that you brought to life in your noisy woodshop in the garage. you made some beautiful things that still fill the house: coffee tables, cabinets, deep-stained cedar chests, trash bins and — your favorite — foot stools. you enjoyed making them and took great pride in your attention to each detail; the ornately carved mahogany stained legs, about 14” tall, with a shallow cushion swaddled in microfiber upholstery of various patterns. each of these creations handmade and unique.

You also made some stuff that was a little ...um... “rough” around the edges; a wardrobe closet with sliding doors that wouldn’t quite close all the way, the gargantuan bookshelf with a precarious forward lean (that has miraculously never tipped over). You weren’t one for instruction manuals and tutorials; you preferred the jackleg, trial-and-error method of doing things. “Don’t worry about me — I got it!” was the unspoken directive most of the time, so we’d back off and leave you to it, while mom went upstairs and prayed real hard that you didn’t lose a finger.

one hot day, you felt industrious and decided to launch your pop-up footstool shop in the driveway. you laid out your inventory with a sign: ‘foot stools $50/each’ written in magic marker. you sat in a folding chair with a mouth full of chewing tobacco and a tumbler of gin sweating in the sun, waiting eagerly for a queue of cars to pull up. hours passed, but no takers. dissuaded, you unceremoniously brought your wares back to the house, never to reopen. grand opening, grand closing.

you were always worried about something, anxious about this or that. i know you worried about all of your kids a lot, especially me, the big dreamer. i wish you could’ve lived to see me thrive; to know that i wasn’t going to show up one morning in a uhaul after an overnight drive from New York and say “well, daddy… i tried!” i know how much you liked to fly, and wish that i could’ve flown you and momma to come visit me at least one more time.

for the last five years, your grave has become a confessional for me. when i‘m trapped, unable to articulate my feelings, I come to see you and confess my failures. and recently, i failed spectacularly.

dad, i became a version of myself i hardly recognized. a heavy cloud of shame consumed me, the fog distorting my reflection. i could barely make out my own face, recognize my own voice. i lied — deceived people i purported to love. I was reckless, callous. i lied to myself until the curtain was pulled back. my personal failures were put on display, as my friends and colleagues were called inside to see the great Oz and my mask disintegrated in the sunlight. the coldest comfort is knowing that all my wounds were self-inflicted. as proud as you could have been of my career, you’d have been equally ashamed of everything else.

there’s always a lesson — and my biggest one was that grace grows in unlikely places. real friends showed up, sprouting up like blades of grass between concrete slabs. there were beautiful souls who were kind to me, even when I confessed my ugliest acts. they laid gentle hands on my heart, and they told me about myself with love and unflinching candor. they guarded me, spoke up for me, loved me. they reminded me that despite my failures, i was still good, that there is still good in me. grace was always there, waiting for the sunlight.

this failure really knocked the wind out of me and sent me reeling. when i was faced with the ugliest parts of myself, it was nearly impossible to just “press on”, or put “one foot in front of the other,” like you used to say. i couldn’t outrun my shadow, and i found myself at 45, simultaneously overworked and overwhelmed by success and failure.

being strong used to mean pushing through the exhaustion, ignoring the aches, the pains, the fear, the worry. but these days, strength looks different. strength is acknowledging my own pain and seeking help to mend the broken places. strength is making time to rest and to renew my body and my mind. strength is self-love. strength is the heavy lifting and the deep, personal work of sorting through the rubble and rebuilding the good. strength is vulnerability.

i guess that’s why i’m writing you. because for all the times i told you i loved you — and i know you knew — i was never vulnerable enough to tell you that you were a good man. and that is my greatest regret —- not you missing my face on the cover of a magazine or videos of me playing at madison square garden —- i regret not having the courage to tell you how good a man you were. it would have been too foreign a moment between the two of us - we were never good with words of affection. i know now there were seasons when you needed to be reminded that you were a good man. i am living through one of them.

our relationship continues across this great divide, and there are moments when I can feel you standing on the other side of the imaginary glass separating our dimensions, waving to me, watching me, winking at me the same way you did the day I loaded my van and left for New York. The love in your eyes evokes all the words you couldn’t bring your mouth to form, and even in my darkest hours, you are here, and I feel safe and loved. daddy, that is your legacy.

and so five years on, it’s time for me to put some things to rest, too. it’s time for me to lay down my pride, my all consuming ambition, my ego, and this heavy mask that i’ve spent so much time constructing. some of my dreams have proven too heavy, so i’m letting them go to make space for new, more meaningful ones, which come to me much more clearly these days:

It is five years from today, and I’m standing in the wide open sunny living space of my own home, which is filled with pictures of you and Momma, captured in the happiest times. I have a wife and children of my own. The children are most likely toddlers, bouncing around the house, shrieking and squealing in fits of noisy play.

they stand on one of the footstools you built and point to your picture, mounted high on the wall, and they look at me with questions in their eyes. I tell them this is your Granddaddy, and he was a good man.

i love you, daddy

your son,

-Nate

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