The Lessons Dad Left Behind

Father's Day has a way of making you look backward.

My dad has been gone nearly five years now. He passed away suddenly at the age of 49 at the farm in 2021. Looking back, that first year after his death was one of the hardest periods of my life.

I was 21 years old and trying to finish my Mechanical Engineering degree at Wichita State University. At the same time, I was helping take care of the farm, working through probate, and learning more about Kansas estate statutes than I ever expected to know. Then, just two weeks after Dad passed away, my grandmother died. Suddenly, my grandpa was grieving the loss of his wife of 53 years while our family was still trying to process losing Dad.

There were difficult decisions to make. Funeral arrangements. Estate matters. Then came all the firsts that everyone warns you about—the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas, the first birthdays and anniversaries.

I managed to keep moving forward, but grief has a funny way of hanging around. It took me more than a year before I finally shut off his phone service. Part of me always hoped it might ring one more time.

As time has passed, I've realized something important.

Most of my childhood was Dad preparing me for the day he couldn't be there.

At the time, I didn't recognize it.

My upbringing was far from typical. My mother left when I was two years old, leaving Dad to raise a two-year-old and a six-year-old on his own while trying to keep a household running. My grandmother Hook and great-grandmother Winger helped when they could, but most days it was simply Dad, my sister, and me.

And nearly everywhere Dad went, I went.

I spent countless hours at the Big Bow Coop and Dermot Coop. Then came countless more hours riding in tractors and pickups. If there was custom farm work to do, we were headed there. From Elkhart to Tribune, from the state line to Sublette, whether it was planting or applying anhydrous, Dad hooked up the equipment and went to work.

One year I remember us covering nearly 7,000 acres with an eight-row planter. Today that may not sound like much, but on a 20-foot planter it was a tremendous amount of ground.

Because of that life, expectations were high.

Dad didn't have much patience for mistakes, and looking back, I understand why. On a farm, one careless mistake can become a serious accident. Once he knew my sister and I could do something safely, the expectations immediately increased.

By the time I was five years old, we were loading a pickup and fencing trailer after school and putting up hot-wire fence for cattle on wheat pasture. To this day, I'm still not entirely sure how my sister and I managed to run the old My-D Han-D post-hole digger by ourselves.

Sometimes I look at kids today and have to laugh when I think about some of the things we did.

Picture this: I was three years old and my sister was seven when we flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, to visit our mother. Dad dropped us off at the Wichita airport with unaccompanied minor tags around our wristss. We boarded a plane to Atlanta, then another to Charlotte. No cell phones. No tracking apps. No constant updates.

Crazy to think about now.

But apparently we were capable, because we made it there and back just fine.

Dad encouraged us to pursue our interests, but only if we were willing to give them everything we had. My sister loved horses, so horses became part of our lives. Eventually, simply riding horses wasn't enough—we were expected to break our own.

I was often the one assigned to ride the "hop" out of them. I quickly learned that if I got bucked off, the problem wasn't solved. Dad figured that out too. A few times he tied my belt loops to the saddle.

Probably not conventional.

But I stayed on.

One thing he absolutely never tolerated was cutting corners.

The first time I swept a field, I left what farmers call "teardrops" in the turns. After one field, he pulled me out of the tractor, handed me a hoe, and made me fix every single one by hand.

The same thing happened when I missed wheat heads while running the combine. He handed me a pair of scissors and told me to clip every head I'd left standing.

You only have to do that a few times before you start paying attention.

Dad also had an incredible work ethic and expected the same from us. Whether it was sweeping corners, servicing equipment, or roading machinery to Scott Power or Garden City Farm Equipment, he knew exactly how long the job should take. When he said "Go," the clock was running.

Looking back, those lessons weren't really about farming.

They were about responsibility.

They were about attention to detail.

They were about learning that excuses don't solve problems.

Most importantly, they were about learning how to handle pressure.

Dad taught us countless practical things along the way. I know never to use galvanized pipe with propane. I know never to use a steel shovel in a grain bin with a concrete floor. One summer my sister and I were handed boards and learned how to pour 35 cubic yards of concrete on our own. I learned how to troubleshoot equipment, think through problems, and work until the job was finished.

I inherited some of his ability with numbers, though not nearly all of it. He could remember phone numbers, acreage figures, and calculations without ever writing anything down or reaching for a calculator.

There is still so much I wish I could ask him.

There are days when I wish I could pick up the phone and hear his answer to a problem.

But then I realize something.

Most of the answers are already there.

They were taught one lesson, one job, one correction, and one long day at a time.

As I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate how difficult life was for him. Raising two children alone while trying to make a living farming was never easy. The harder things became for him, the harder he pushed my sister and me.

At the time, we didn't appreciate it.

Today, I can on parts.

Both my sister and I graduated at the top of our classes, then went on to my sister receiving her Masters and myself a Bachelors in challenging fields of study. Both of us learned how to operate under pressure without panicking. When Dad died unexpectedly, we didn't have the luxury of falling apart for long. There was too much that needed done.

And somehow, we were ready.

Not because we expected to lose him.

But because he had spent years preparing us for life.

This Father's Day, I miss my dad just as much as I did five years ago.

The difference is that now I understand the gift he left behind.

It wasn't land, equipment, or possessions.

It was the ability to keep moving forward when life gets hard.

And that lesson has carried me farther than anything else ever could.