go.Jimmy.go

August 31st, 2026. My dad would have turned 80 today.

It’s strange to even write those words.

In my memories, Dad never grew old. He never reached the age where his hair turned completely gray, where his steps slowed down, or where I had to start worrying about him because he was getting up there in years.

He was only 51 when he died. So when I think about him now, I still see the man I knew as a kid. Tough. Strong. A southpaw. A hard-ass at times and definitely someone you didn’t want to get into a scuffle with.

Here was a man who once told my brother (after a clerical error sent from school informed him that his son wasn’t going to graduate) promised to have my brother sit on a chair in the corner of the kitchen every day for the entire summer — and for a short while we all believed that’s exactly what was going to happen.

But underneath that tough-guy exterior was another side of him.

Some of my favorite childhood memories are of the long camping trips our family took every summer with relatives. I’ve heard more than one person say that putting all of us crazy Woods together in one campground was a sure sign of the apocalypse.

Fortunately, there was never any fire or brimstone. Just poker and UNO card games, fishing, pitching quoits, cold drinks and nights sitting around a campfire laughing about things that probably weren’t nearly as funny as we thought they were.

I also remember the summers growing up when dad would go shirtless to get the patio ready for picnics or other celebrations, and people from all up and down the block would stop by to partake or just to say hello.

Inevitably, tales would be told about my father’s antics. Ones I was too young to understand. But even today, my uncles regale me with funny stories about how my father had always gotten them into, or out of, some sort of “trouble.”

There are hundreds of memories I could share about my father today, including how he gave me my love of classic Mustangs. But on what would have been his 80th birthday, I keep coming back to three moments in particular:

The Stop and Think Moment.

The Drifting Apart Moment.

And The Prodigal Son Moment.

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The Stop and Think Moment

This is the one I remember most. It happened during a summer rainstorm when I was a kid.

I’d been outside playing football with some neighborhood friends before the rain started and had gotten into a fight with one of them. What the fight was about has long since disappeared from my memory. At that age it was probably something incredibly important, like somebody throwing a football at somebody else’s head.

I came storming into the house angry at the world. Dad was sitting alone at the kitchen table drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette.

There was no central air conditioning back then, so during the summer the windows stayed cracked open and big portable fans pushed the warn air around the house. I can still remember the smell of the wet asphalt outside as the rain cooled the street, mixing with the cigarette smoke drifting toward the window.

Dad could tell I was pissed. He asked me what happened.

“So-and-so threw the ball at my head!” I said, or something to that effect.

I expected Dad to immediately take my side.

He didn’t.

Instead, he gave me one of his lectures about football, friendship and life.

“Stop and think,” he said. “Did you do anything to bring this on?”

Of course I had. There was always some small detail I’d conveniently leave out of the story. Something I’d said. Something I’d done. Some reason why maybe I wasn’t quite as innocent as I’d made myself out to be.

“But…but…”

“Stop and think.”

Then he’d ask another question.

And another.

“Stop and think. Is this really worth getting into a fight over?”

I’d shrug.

“Stop and think. Tomorrow, is any of this even going to matter?”

Probably not.

At some point he also informed me that the kid I thought was so tough “couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag.”

That one still makes me laugh.

But somewhere near the end of that conversation, Dad said something that had nothing to do with football or fighting or the kid down the street.

“Stop and think about something else,” he said. “Someday you’re going to be grown up and have a life of your own. You’re going to have problems a lot bigger than this. Just remember something: no matter what happens, your mother and I love you guys. Don’t ever forget that.” He was referring to my brother, sister, and me.

At that age, I probably didn’t understand why he felt the need to tell me.

By the time our conversation ended, my young brain was exhausted from all that damn thinking.

But I wasn’t angry anymore.

And all these years later, whenever there’s a gray summer afternoon and rain is falling outside my window, I sometimes find myself back in that kitchen.

I can smell the rain.

I can hear the fan.

I can see Dad sitting at the table.

And I can still hear him.

Stop and think.

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The Drifting Apart Moment

Unfortunately, life doesn’t always follow the script we’d like it to.

My parents separated and eventually divorced in the early 1980s. By then, alcohol—which has always been something of an Achilles’ heel in my family—had begun changing my relationship with Dad.

We still talked. Sometimes on the phone. Sometimes in person. But too often the beer became involved, and conversations became difficult.

My brother and sister saw him much more frequently than I did. They were better able to look beyond the drinking.

I couldn’t.

Then I went off to college. I started building my own life. The phone calls became less frequent. Weeks became months. Sometimes months would become a year.

We simply drifted apart.

I eventually learned that Dad had quietly remarried, and the next time I spent any significant amount of time with him was at my own wedding in 1995.

It was awkward at first. How could it not be?

But that awkwardness eventually disappeared, and the day became special for another reason beyond the obvious one. For the first time in years, we were all together again. There are even photographs to prove it.

I never stopped loving my father during those years. That wasn’t the problem. Sometimes two people can love each other and still become lost to one another.

That’s what happened to us.

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The Prodigal Son Moment

Then came a day in mid 1996. My aunt called to tell me Dad was in the hospital. The doctors had found a mass in his colon. Cancer. They operated and initially believed they’d caught it in time, but Dad was told that if he wanted the best chance of recovering, the drinking and smoking had to stop.

He agreed.

And over the next fifteen months, something happened that I hadn’t expected.

I got my father back.

One of my favorite memories from that period thirty years ago is also one of the strangest.

One day my dad insisted that my brother and I go to the bar with him. You heard me correctly. A bar. Right into The Lion’s Den.

Considering everything that had happened, taking Dad to a bar was probably somewhere near the bottom of my list of good ideas, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

So we went.

There I was, now old enough to legally drink myself, sitting in a bar with my father and brother while Dad played poker machines and drank non-alcoholic beer.

Maybe it was some kind of rite of passage for him. Maybe he wanted to prove he had finally beaten the thing that had caused so much damage. Or maybe he just wanted to sit in a bar with his two sons.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I went.

Unfortunately though, cancer wasn’t finished with him.

By August 1997, Dad was back in the hospital. He’d just turned 51.

Fifty-one.

The older I get, the more impossibly young that sounds.

Dad lay in bed, surrounded by tubes, medications and machines. Morphine kept the pain under control as best it could.

I visited whenever I could between work and everything else going on in my life.

On some of those nights we’d talk if he was up to it. I kept hoping for another one of those long conversations from my childhood. Another lecture. Another chance for him to tell me to stop and think. But by then, I was grateful for whatever conversation I could get.

Then October arrived.

My birthday is October 5.

As Dad’s condition worsened, I remember sitting beside his bed one night, closing my eyes and making a selfish request to God.

If you’re going to take him, please don’t take him on my birthday.

Any day but the fifth.

I just couldn’t bear the thought of celebrating my birthday every year knowing it was also the day my father died.

Looking back now, I realize it wouldn’t have mattered, but someone must have been listening. Dad made it through my birthday. I turned 28 with my father still here.

At the time I didn’t realize it, but that became one of the greatest birthday gifts I’ve ever received.

For the next ten days, there were even moments when he seemed to improve.

We allowed ourselves to hope, but the doctors knew better. They told us he was the sickest person in the hospital.

Then came October 17, 1997.

Around 10 p.m.

I was in his darkened hospital room. My brother and sister weren’t there. A small light above Dad’s bed and the glow from the medical equipment provided most of the illumination.

I’m no expert on theology. I can’t tell you what happens when we die. I can only tell you what happened in that room.

As Dad began struggling for breath, I knew the end was coming. And suddenly, the room felt cold.

Not slightly cooler. Cold. So much so that I began to shiver.

Then I had an overwhelming sensation that we weren’t alone anymore.

I’ve never forgotten it. I probably never will.

I told Dad I loved him. His eyes seemed focused somewhere beyond me. Somewhere I couldn’t see. Somehow though, he managed to tell me he loved me too.

Then my father spoke the final word he would ever say in this life.

“God.”

And then there was silence.

My father wasn’t a religious man. I don’t remember him going to church. I don’t remember seeing him read the Bible. I don’t remember hearing him pray. Yet the last word he ever spoke here on Earth was:

God.

I’ve wondered about that moment for nearly thirty years.

What did he see?

I don’t know. Maybe someday I will.

What I do know is that in that moment, every year we’d spent apart disappeared. The anger didn’t matter. The alcohol didn’t matter. The missed phone calls didn’t matter.

None of it mattered.

He was my dad.

I was his son.

And I was there.

For years afterward, I’ve wondered whether I’d change anything if someone somehow gave me the chance to go back.

Of course there are things I wish we’d done differently. There are years I’d like back. There are conversations I wish we’d had. But life doesn’t give us rewrites. Instead, it gives us memories.

Cancer has done terrible things to my family. Things I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Yet as strange as it sounds, there is one thing cancer gave me that I’ll always be grateful for:

It gave me my father back.

Maybe only for fifteen months, but it was enough time to find each other again.

Dad would have been 80 years old today.

I wonder what he’d look like.

I wonder what we’d talk about.

I wonder what he’d think about the 57-year-old man I’ve become.

I’d like to imagine we’d sit at a kitchen table somewhere. Maybe a portable fan would be running and there’d be rain tapping softly against the windows. Maybe we’d talk about family, life, mistakes, football, getting older, and all the things that happen in the years between being someone’s little boy and becoming an old man yourself.

And knowing Dad, at some point he’d probably interrupt me.

“Stop and think.”

I do, Dad.

More often than you could ever know.

Happy 80th Birthday. I love you.