My Father’s Brass Ring

My father was my person. He passed away during my first year of high school. Here’s a story that I tell sometimes as an indicator of how much my person he was…

I felt the moment that his life ended. I was in my first period writing class in lower Manhattan. My father was in a hospital in Brooklyn. I took a breath in. I took a breath out. When my exhale should have ended, I felt more air coming through my body. It lasted an abnormally long amount of time, and I won't say that I heard at that moment, ‘your father is gone,’ but I knew that something had happened, something different. So that day I came home from school, my mother met me at the bus stop, I’d take two trains and a bus to get back home. She was there for me at the bus stop. Didn't say anything to me, and took me out with my brother. It was all a production type of thing, and when she finally said words to me, she said, ‘your dad, he’s gone.’ I said, ‘I know,” and when she told me when it happened, I said, ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’

So my dad's ring. He was a lot thinner than I am, so it went on his ring finger. It doesn't fit on my ring finger, I can only wear it on my pinky. But it doesn't quite fit on my pinky, because my pinky is too thin. It's not quite as wide as his ring finger was, and it's interesting because he was my person. The person I looked up to – cool. The whole neighborhood knew him, like I actually have a picture of him on our stoop and it's on my work desk. It's taken from behind them so you can see his head, and you can see the block where his congregation would gather. He used to tell me all the time, ‘don't be like me, be better than me,’ Which again, I lost him at 14. That was inconceivable to me, how to be better than this person. And so there's been this… as I came of age, I checked off some of the things that he'd done.

As I graduated high school, I compared what was my high school graduation like and what accomplishments or accolades that I would leave high school with. As I went on to and graduated from a four year university, knowing that he had gotten his associates, there was a consistent measuring with my father… as I became a husband and a father, as my marriage dissolved, there was this constant looking and measuring.

So, the ring is both a memory and a physical thing that I have of him. I don't wear it all the time because it doesn't fit, I put it on when I want a little extra something… when I want to swag it out a little bit, or when I just want to add a statement piece. And it's not even so much that I want to bring my father with me to a space, because I think he knows my mother reminds me all the time when she calls me ‘chip.’

When I walk into a space, my father's already with me. To make it biblical, if you've seen me, you've seen my dad – that kind of energy. But the fact that this ring doesn't fit me either in the way that he wore it or in the way that I tried to appropriate it feels significant somehow. It feels like he's still saying, ‘don't be like me, be better than me.’ Like, stop the comparisons because they're not fruitful. Even the things that we have in common, you are your own person, you’ve got to do it your own way.

So, it feels like I'm wearing a warm lesson of his. It feels like an echo of that message. It feels like he's still speaking to me and giving me guidance. That's been one of the ways that I've missed my father the most. Similar to the way that I do when I'm facilitating or consulting, he was so good at helping me reach an answer that felt like it was all me, to which I could not have arrived without his guidance.

And so, this ring is a warm reminder, that echo of a lesson, and that encouraging message that you're doing it, and it doesn't have to look like anything that you've seen. It's okay to be a trailblazer. It's okay to be unique. It's okay to be a dreamer. Keep persisting and keep charting your path.