After Kelly Lytle’s father died, he wanted something more from the relationship — and it threatened to ruin his memories of this great man and athlete.
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Author’s Note: My father, Rob Lytle, died of a heart attack at 56 years old in November 2010. His death hurt unlike anything I had ever experienced. My heart shattered; my soul flatlined. Dad and I were close since I can remember, and I couldn’t imagine life without the father who doubled as my best friend.
I started writing To Dad, From Kelly to cope with the grief laying waste to me after Dad’s death. I wanted to feel my father’s presence again, to see his sly grin slide across his face as he coated some piece of fatherly advice with his charming, self-deprecating humor. I wanted to remember his lessons and center my life on the values he taught. And I needed to explore the questions of our relationship that we never had the courage to either ask or answer.
Dad had been an All-American running back at Michigan. He graduated as the school’s all-time leader in career rushing yards and finished 3rd in voting for the 1976 Heisman Trophy before playing seven seasons for the Denver Broncos. He knew sports, and he knew how to weave his experiences into everlasting teachings on humility, teamwork, self-sacrifice, inclusion, and acceptance. I played sports my entire life. Naturally, Dad and I found an easy bond around the subject.
While reflecting on our relationship, though, I realized that one of the burning questions I still had for my father was whether we had sacrificed a deeper connection because we relied too much on sports to guide our interactions. I wanted more from my father—my best friend—and this excerpt from To Dad, From I explain how that need nearly upset how I remember dad.
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My dad’s death compelled me to believe I needed to change history. In the months after he died, I wanted something better from our relationship. I call it the curse of more, and it threatened to ruin my memories of my father.
I first felt something was wrong five months after Dad died. On April 30, 2011, the Sandusky County (Ohio) Board of Developmental Disabilities (SCBDD) dedicated its learning and activity center to Dad for his efforts with the organization. The SCBDD provides individuals with developmental disabilities and their families with services and support to enhance the quality of their everyday lives. Dad served the SCBDD as a board member and active volunteer during his final years.
Speakers that afternoon remembered Dad for his sense of humor, caring, and selflessness. He had been instrumental in finding and securing financing for the new center. For this, the crowd demonstrated deep gratitude. The spirit of the dedication floored me. I left that day prouder of Dad for his efforts with the SCBDD than for anything he had ever accomplished as an athlete. But I resented him, too, because the program revealed to me aspects of my dad I had missed out on.
As time passed, I kept reflecting on the dedication. I found myself unable to celebrate the moment. Instead, I became annoyed at how little I understood about why Dad cared so much for helping the individuals at this particular center. Dad and I had spoken many times of his involvement with the SCBDD, but he shielded any window into feelings with his matter-of-factness. “Just trying to help,” he would say, and I would let the moment pass.
Dad skirted the “why” behind his motivations with the SCBDD just as he never spoke about all the work he did for organizations like the March of Dimes and Special Olympics during and after his Bronco days. I remember him paying a running tab at a local diner so a homeless man he knew could eat breakfast. He never mentioned why, just as he never spoke about other acts of kindness.
“What’s reason got to do with anything?” I picture him responding to my imagined pleas for understanding. “It’s the right thing to do. What else do I need to explain?”
In life, I accepted the wall Dad constructed. In death, I wanted revelations of what made him tick. The whisper intensified. I wanted more.
Frustration spread like an infection in the months that followed the SCBDD dedication. I obsessed over many of our conversations. Even as I wrote the stories of appreciation within To Dad, From Kelly, I saw where our bond had failed instead of succeeded. I saw athletics, a cornerstone of our interactions, as a hindrance rather than a facilitator. For the first time, I challenged the sanctity of our reliance on sports as an intimate bond.
Communicating with much emotional weight never came easy to Dad, and it isn’t easy for me. Maybe the playing fields, where actions and quiet sacrifice speak louder than words, were the culprit. Sports gave our relationship an outlet, a platform for discussing hopes through the lens of an upcoming football game or exposing regret for lost opportunities under the guise of missed free throws at the end of a youth basketball tournament.
I felt comfortable speaking to Dad about my fears of failure as long as I revealed those fears during a talk about nerves before a track meet. Dad could empathize. “Sometimes I was scared to play before a big game,” he would tell me. “I was that nervous. But I knew the more nervous I was, the better I would play.”
Dad and I relied on sports for purpose. We anchored our conversations in athletics because doing so meant we never had to admit how directionless we would have felt without its regimens and clear goals. Vulnerability could exist as long as it occurred between the white lines of a football field.
Dad and I relied on sports for purpose. We anchored our conversations in athletics because doing so meant we never had to admit how directionless we would have felt without its regimens and clear goals.
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We discussed more than sports, of course, but when I was growing up I always found it easier to discuss practices and game preparation instead of topics with more substance. We analyzed opponents and considered past performances as the means to improve future ones. Although we chatted about schoolwork, college, and girls, and we made veiled references to the future, nothing carried the same significance as talking sports. The more I grieved over Dad’s death, the emptier I perceived what we had shared. In a relationship strong enough to accept any conversation, why didn’t we talk about more?
The worst part, I believe, is that neither Dad nor I wanted or believed in such constrained exchanges. We simply didn’t know anything different. Sports gave our relationship a default setting that we accepted as enough. Despite all the talking we did, I came to wonder what I had missed. Mixed with all the appreciation I felt for my father was a feeling that he hadn’t cut it. I let hindsight, with its promise for perfection, strip from me the specialness of the past. These emotions hurt.
Then, things changed. Maybe I wrote myself through the curse or enough time passed for my feelings to shift. Maybe I overcame my selfishness, or I finally appreciated that life, despite its flaws, is precious.
I’m not sure what happened. I still have questions, and this book is full of lost opportunities that weigh on me and always will. But what time has taught is how lucky I am to have enjoyed what I did with my dad.
I would give anything for more time with Dad. But it occurs to me, after all the tears I’ve cried, that a point of my grief was to understand how to celebrate everything I had while relinquishing the burden of wanting more from the person I lost.
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I can now let my mind return without regret to the afternoon when the SCBDD dedicated its activity center. No, Dad and I never discussed his motivations for helping. And yes, at times we let the familiarity and comfort of sports replace the possibility for more emotional interactions. So what? The memories I do have are what matter.
Dad valued others, and I never pressed him about why. I didn’t need to, though, because I saw it firsthand as a boy when I watched him rescue two strangers stranded in a snowstorm on an otherwise empty road. And I watched young kids from all backgrounds, some blessed by fate and some cursed by it, leave the neighborhood softball games Dad hosted believing more in their own special importance after having been included in hours of play. Sports helped me appreciate perseverance and self-sacrifice. The talks I shared with Dad reinforced these traits. I learned through such moments. Call that cliché. I call it influential.
I would give anything for more time with Dad. But it occurs to me, after all the tears I’ve cried, that a point of my grief was to understand how to celebrate everything I had while relinquishing the burden of wanting more from the person I lost.
Thank you, Dad.
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Photos: Courtesy of author