It’s been a few weeks since I’ve published anything. I didn’t plan to come back with a tribute. But after we buried Terry last weekend, this is what came out.
I wasn’t expecting the grief to hit this hard. Then again, I didn’t expect someone who showed up for me so many years ago to still live this deep in my bones.
This one’s for him.
When I was ten years old, I couldn’t hit a baseball to save my life.
Not for lack of trying. I was one of the “good kids” in tee-ball. Top of the batting order. Confident.
Then we hit grade four. Live pitching. Real kids. Wild arms.
I was terrified of getting beaned. Couldn’t admit that out loud. Hell, I’m not sure I even knew it myself.
All I knew was, I was fast becoming the county strikeout king.
Then one night, Terry took me out to the diamond.
“I’ll show ya how to hit,” he said.
It was early June in Northern Minnesota. Evening sun low in the sky, cottonwood fluff drifting through the air like slow-motion snow.
Terry stood on the mound in jeans and a faded olive green dust-streaked T-shirt, windup already halfway through before I even knew he’d started.
And he threw heat.
Harder than any kid I’d faced that season.
And I crushed every pitch.
I didn’t know something could hurt this bad.
Didn’t think a man I hadn’t seen much in twenty years could break me like this.
But Terry’s death hit like a steel-toed boot to the ribs. No warning. Just boom, you’re on the ground, wondering what the hell just happened.
It always seems to be the things you never see coming. Like the universe winding up a kick and reminding you:
This is fragile. It can end at any moment.
Terry wasn’t family, at least not by blood. But blood never meant much to me, not when you grow up around men like him.
He was a bigger guy. T-shirt and jeans. Catcher’s mitt hands. Always dirty, always working.
He and my dad bonded over truck stop buffets and vending machine Mountain Dews at the loading dock. That was their love language: bullshit, caffeine, and shared miles.
Terry laughed like a busted carburetor—wheezing, sputtering, full of life. And when something really cracked him up, he’d pull off his glasses to wipe away the tears, just like his Uncle Al used to.
If you pissed him off, he let you know. No bottling it up. No slow-simmering resentment like the rest of us. You always knew where you stood with Terry. I respected that.
Hell, sometimes it pissed me off, but I respected it.
That summer, he hired me to mow his lawn. Only yard I ever had on the books, and I hated every second of it.
Our mower was a Sherman Tank John Deere from 1981. No automatic drive. No mercy. No chance in hell for a scrawny ten-year-old.
Just me—64 pounds of ambitionless child labor—lugging that beast across the lawn like a prisoner on a chain gang. Starting it took 106 pulls and filled the block with smoke thick enough to fog out a mosquito crew.
I rarely got the yard mowed on time. One day, Terry came home and caught my mom mowing it for me.
“You know that’s fucking bullshit, Adam,” he said.
He wasn’t wrong.
And yeah, I still feel like a shitheel for it.
But those words stuck. It took a few decades, but they sank in.
You commit to something, you finish the job. Be a man of your word.
That voice was always back there, whether I wanted it or not.
Terry showed up when I was twelve, too—my first year of hunting.
Drove me around for four days after a snowstorm, just so I could maybe see a deer. And on that final day, right before sunset, he spotted two brown dots in a field out by Englund Store.
“Let’s go get ’em.”
We walked a half mile in the cold and the mud. He talked me through it like some new-age Polish hunting monk.
Breathe. Squeeze the trigger. Don’t pull it.
I hit it on the first shot.
Then came the real work, gutting it, dragging it 900 yards through swampy snow goo, and hauling it back to his shop, where he showed me how to finish the job.
No shortcuts. No babying. Just do the damn work.
I think that’s why this hit me so hard.
Because I never realized until yesterday just how much of him I carried with me.
And now I don’t get to tell him that.
At the funeral, I barely got a seat. Showed up “early,” and the line was out the door. Felt like the whole damn town came. And they probably did because Terry showed up for everyone, leaving a mark on every person he ever met.
We buried him at 53.
There’s one night I’ll never forget.
I was probably 11 or 12. Woke up in the basement. The old 13-inch Magnavox was replaying a Twins game. Voices upstairs. My folks must’ve brought back half the bar.
I sit up, and there’s Terry, sitting in my fold-up Dallas Cowboys chair in the dark.
“I’ll always love your dad, Adam. And I’ll always love you. If anything ever happens to him, just know that I’ll be here for you.”
Then he got up and walked upstairs, just like that. No discussion. No fanfare.
I always thought it was a drunk “I love you, man” moment.
Turns out, it wasn’t.
Turns out, he meant it.
He taught me to swing. To laugh. To show up. To finish the job.
And that thing about smiling and waving when a woman catches you gawking from the passenger seat of a semi?
That was Terry, too.
He threw harder than any fourth grader ever could.
And I crushed every damn pitch.
Why could I hit him but not the kids in my league?
I didn’t get it then. But I do now.
I trusted him.
Because Terry showed up.
I went back to striking out the next day, by the way.
Didn’t matter. That’s not the point.
The point is, he showed up.
He always did.
One of the most beautiful—and sometimes embarrassing—things about young kids is that they have no filter.
They know what they want, and they aren’t afraid to announce it to anyone within a twelve-foot radius. No sugar coating. No overthinking. Just direct and to the point.
Somewhere along the way, we lose that.
I don’t think it happens all at once. It fades slowly, each time a parent tells you not to dream so big, or some classmate laughs at your idea. Eventually, you start believing your dreams don’t matter. That what you want or how you feel is something best kept to yourself.
But Terry never lost that.
If he thought something was bullshit, he told you.
If he wanted something, he said so.
You pissed him off? You’d be the first one to know it.
I always respected that about him, even when it ground my gears, because with people like that, you’re not always gonna like what you hear.
But you always know where you stand.
The world lost a treasure last week.
And something in me cracked wide open when the dirt hit his casket.
I’ve barely cried in twenty years.
Been divorced twice. Lost both my grandfathers. Lived with the silence of estranged kids since 2005, and the gut-punch of handing off my younger boys every other weekend.
It’s a quiet kind of grief only single fathers understand—one I’ve mostly stuffed down or drank away instead of letting it out.
Grieving’s brutal.
But writing this helped.
If you’ve got someone like Terry in your life, tell them.
Don’t wait.
Miss the shit out of that man.
Just wish I could have shown up for him one more time.
The best compliment of all: To live in the memory of others.
Terry may be in the ground, but he’s in your heart. Keep him top of mind every day. He knew. He understood you.