My Dad Died Today
A week of grief observed and shared for your potential benefit
Hello friends. Today I’m going to get a little personal with you all. I’ve been away this week to deal with the fallout of the sudden death of my Dad, Timothy Donovan Kent, age 69. Much of what you’ll read here may feel like a personal diary entry and not connected to what Geeky Stoics is all about. Our stated purpose here is to help you “Live Better, Mythically” and share philosophical insights echoed in popular culture. But you’ll find that confronting Death is a standard pillar of each tale in any of the stories we focus on, whether it be Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, or Narnia. Go figure….Death is the one thing all human beings have in common. We will die, and most of us worry about or are grappling with the consequences of death in our spheres of influence. I’ve never faced a personal tragedy like this before.
What you’re about to read is my personal writing on different days over the last week. Some of this was scribbled on paper, crammed into the margins of C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, or jotted down in my iPhone Notes app as I processed what was happening.
Dad read Geeky Stoics and always emailed me his thoughts. He referred to me in person and in those emails as Skywalker. I hope something in here resonates or proves itself worthy of your time.
November 18, 2024 (iPhone Notes App)
My Dad died today. It is Monday, November 18th, 2024. A few days ago he went to the ER for abdominal pains and low blood pressure. After rushing down to North Carolina to be with him, he was discharged. The pain continued, so we convinced him to go to his primary care doctor, who then recommended he go back to the ER immediately. After we sat in the ER waiting room for 7 hours, we learned he had some kind of colon infection and had developed severe sepsis. The doctors were confident. Very confident. At least in how they presented themselves. Dad was put on the proper IVs and antibiotics. He was improving fast and was stable. I went home to Virginia on Saturday afternoon. Fast forward to Monday morning and I got a text saying that Dad’s heart rate was getting really high and out of control. I was notified by his wife around 11 AM that things were getting weird. By 1 PM he had passed away. Something failed. Dad’s heart. The medicine. The doctors…
Something or someone failed. I got the call while sitting in the bank working on signing papers for an auto loan.
It’s been a few hours. I feel everything right now. I loved my Dad and we were very close. I am so glad I chose to drive down and see him when his health first got rocky on Wednesday. If I hadn’t, if I had counted pennies and been stingy, I would have never seen him or gotten to have that time with him. We laughed together and talked politics as usual. I really just had no idea that was going to be the last time. When I left the hospital after he’d started to show improvement, I kissed him on the forehead and walked away.
I remember feeling weird about kissing him. That’s not a thing him and I really do. I just felt compelled to that time. Perhaps it was his vulnerable state in the hospital bed, all sleepy and disheveled in his hospital gown. I had been helping to take care of him in some very intimate ways. So I kissed his forehead. When I left the room, we turned the lights off, and I did look back once more. I’m glad I did.
I had this sinking feeling that things could change for the worse. His heart still worried me and I was not fully confident that things were going to remain okay. So I looked back over my shoulder once more to him lying there in the dark, half-asleep. Again, I’m glad I did.
What hurts me though is that I don’t remember what I said to him as I left the hospital. I don’t have some last words to reflect on. I must have said something funny or casual, kissed his head, and walked out. I do know I said, “I love you”. But what came before or after that is a mystery to me. I am left with this sad feeling that the words were insignificant.
He found a way to be okay with things not being okay.
On the one hand, my Dad’s final years were not what I would have wanted for him. He was rather constrained. His mother-in-law had been moved into his house on hospice, and for over a year it had been eating into his savings and retirement. He and his lovely wife, Andra, could almost never travel due to the care her mother required. Dad didn’t love it, but he was cool about it. That’s what was fascinating to me. He was still happy. Even though he was not retiring on time, and bleeding massive amounts of money every day, Dad was truly happy. His marriage was charming and his bond with Andra was rock solid. They deeply loved one another. You could see it and feel it in their presence. Dad was at ease.
What’s remarkable to me about this is that my Dad was not like this when we were kids. He was on edge, quick to anger over small things, and very easily flustered. Time, failure, reconnection with God, and the right woman in his life seemed to make all that angst evaporate.
He overcame some demons, as far as I can tell. He won some internal battles.
Dad was able to be relaxed, happy, and at peace with things not going his way. He wasn’t angry and fussy about this very unfortunate situation he and Andra were in. It was just something that had to be done. And he did it with dignity.
What breaks my heart is that in his hospital bed, Dad spoke of wanting to get to “blue water” as soon as possible. Presumably when the mother-in-law passed, he and Andra would take the vacation they earned and reclaim all the lost time.
Reclaim all the missed visits to see grandkids or chances to be with us.
He was ready to retire.
Some of our final conversations were about wrapping up his career on his terms and then enjoying time with his family.
He didn’t get there. I keep thinking of Moses and how he was denied the Promised Land after leading the Israelites through Hell and back again. Not to make things overly grandiose…it’s just that Dad’s story arc might have actually been complete with or without the retirement in paradise.
He won the battle inside of him. That counts for so much. It brings me a lot of joy to know that he found a way to be okay with things not being okay. The rest is secondary. I just wish he had gotten the blue water.
This part hurts me to write. I can barely see straight thinking about it.
I just hope Dad wasn’t scared. I just hope he was asleep or unconscious. I can’t bear the thought of him in cardiac arrest and his faculties fading while he is alone. I want to know what he was thinking about while it happened.
I’ll never know. That hurts the most right now. I want to have been holding his hand. Even if it was ugly and brutal. I wish I had stayed in town with him another two days.
Everything was supposed to be okay.
November 20, 2024: personal journal notes in response to a morning reading of C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain
“What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves,’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
My Dad used to say this a lot… “A good time was had by all”…after an activity or to describe a family trip or something. He died two days ago. He wanted us to be happy and smile. He was a perfect Earthly Father. I wonder what he wanted for me beyond “good times” though. Maybe nothing more, and that is okay. That was his way of loving.
November 21, 2024: personal journal notes in response to a morning reading of C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed
There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met (her). I've plenty of what are called 'resources'. People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.
-C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
I’ve awoken with a crushing headache today. True insult added to injury. I feel full of “common sense” about Dad and then it comes rushing back, right this moment as I write. I’m scared. Who will help me next time I screw things up? Who will save me with no strings attached? The red-hot jab returns. It’s his eyes. Serious but full of concern, shown in his arched eyebrows when he is coaching me through a solution to a problem. So true and directed, I feel invincible when he’s showing the way. It’s pouring rain in this pine forest, but beginning to slow as the morning sun rises. The rain in my head lifts as well and the headache is easing. I pray for peace about his final moments. I pray for peace with his being alone (only with the doctors) when it ended. He’s not alone anymore. What if he didn’t want his children when the medical machines began to scream, but his Mom and Dad? I would."
November 21, 2024: personal journal notes
What I said to him, my final words before leaving his body behind in the funeral home, never to be seen by anyone ever again, was “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” I must have said it a hundred times. What more do we owe our parents besides those two things? Apologies for all we took and broke, and gratitude for what they gave. I am left with a horrible feeling that all I did was take from you, Dad.
Enter into a relationship with the one who is the originator of second chances
November 22, 2024: My Father’s Eulogy, delivered at The Village Chapel in Pinehurst, NC
Out of the Wilderness: By Stephen Kent
The tricky thing about honoring the memory of a widely loved person is that they mean so many different things to so many different people. I wanted to capture what Tim Kent, my Dad, meant to my older sister, Emily, and to my younger brother, Michael. I wanted to speak to all of Dad's friends here today who knew him as an all-star lobbyist and association executive who knew how to make things happen and bring people together across North Carolina.
But I recognized that I couldn’t do that. I can’t speak to each of your stories with him, and there are so many good ones. We all give pieces of ourselves to certain individuals and save pieces for somebody else. And maybe we save a piece for ourselves. Only Andra Zarins knew it all about Tim Kent, and I appreciate the opportunity to stand up here and speak to what I knew about my Dad.
In my heart, the story of my Dad is a Redemption story. It didn’t have the ending I would have written, but the arc was complete.
Tim Kent was a good father. He was engaged in our lives and nursed each of our unique interests. I recall my Dad talking about his father, Duane, who enjoyed fishing with Dad’s older brother, Jim, but Tim didn’t care much for fishing. His father never tried to force the square peg into the round hole. Instead, he nurtured Dad’s love of sports and athletics. Through all of the phases my siblings and I have gone through, Dad demonstrated this same sort of love.
But when I was young, Dad wrestled with Frustration and Anxiety over things that didn’t go as planned. I won’t do storytime about that, but in summary, he was a man who could not go with the flow.
Something about Dad which only grew more visible over time, was that he carried a certain kind of guilt. You could feel it at times in his presence once you’d gotten through the outer shell. He wanted so badly to do right by people in his life, and when he fell short, he never let that go. He’d begin working to pay the debt, real or perceived.
Did this guilt begin with the dissolution of his and my Mother’s union which fractured our family? Or was it rooted in his pain about having left the West Coast to be a TV broadcaster and building his own family 2,700 miles from home? It could have started with a car wreck in 1970 that badly wounded his mother, Kathryn ---- my Dad was the driver.
Or perhaps it was just in his nature, and Dad was touched by God with a unique capacity to crave salvation and be in alignment with his Heavenly Father.
There can be no true repentance without felt guilt, there can be no return to grace without that whisper in your heart that you’ve strayed off the path and need a guide unconstrained by ego, pride, and avarice to take you home.
Since the day I became a father myself and began making mistakes of my own, and facing circumstances beyond my control, all I’ve wanted to tell him is that it is not your fault, Dad.
It is not your fault. It is not your fault.
The most special time I got to spend with my Dad was in 2010. There was no sunshine, seawater, theme parks, or cold beers. Quite the opposite. It was in a period of time that I call The Wilderness.
If you were especially close to my Father, you know of this time, it was after his tenure with the Realtors…and the bright light of Andra Zarins was only just beginning to shine in his life. It was a time of struggle.
I had moved home from Western Carolina University to transfer into UNC-Greensboro. Homesickness had gotten the best of me and Dad opened a room for me in his new residence; a small, very humble apartment by Guilford College.
The trappings of his life had been dissolved and his confidence was broken. I found myself in this place with my Dad, a man who loved driving convertibles and who had provided everything I ever needed on demand, now having microwaved dinners and listening to him do job interviews over the phone in the living room.
There were so many. He would dress up nicely for them…phone calls. And the calls that I remember always ended in disappointment.
But this wasn’t the stereotypical chapter of the story where the man who had everything loses it all and sinks into alcohol, stops shaving, refuses to eat, and never does his laundry.
Tim Kent sank right into the arms of Christ. He returned home.
For the first time I could see with my own eyes, my Dad was steeped in the Bible. He was journaling and cataloging by hand the verses and prayers that he needed. He was seeking counsel from the ministers of Grace Community Church in Greensboro and actively confronting in ink - his demons.
He confessed sin. He named them. He named the people who he’d wronged and who had wronged him, and who he had to forgive.
He even recorded the dates of when he forgave him. Dad was so detailed. If you’ve ever seen my Father’s legislative notes or his scribblings about what needed to get done in Raleigh, he was this precise and intentional about seeking his own redemption. Though he was playing an active role, Dad wasn’t in the driver's seat of his absolution. He had grown tired of driving. Dad was riding shotgun. And in The Wilderness he was weightless.
While I was with Dad in that apartment and trying to be a support for him, I only brought what I thought to be trouble. One evening after he had finished job interviews and dinner was done, I had to confront Dad and reveal that my girlfriend Melony, now my beloved wife of 13 years, was pregnant.
We were both 20, and I was so scared. Not knowing then how much this child would bless our lives. And so in Fear of my Dad’s Anger, I approached him and said the words. Dad cried on the spot. And before I could start trying to explain myself, he brought me in close and just held me.
Dad said, “Everything is going to be okay. Don’t worry, Stephen.”
My Dad had changed. It was at that moment that I knew something in him was reformed. Because the Dad of my childhood, though he was loving, was full of Fear. He wasn’t anymore. And from that day in 2010 until Monday, November 18th, 2024, Dad lived with such remarkable calm. I don’t know how to describe it to y’all.
He was just “along for the ride” now.
And Dad was so happy, finally….He lived more simply, gave abundantly, and without ever making the recipient feel in debt to him. I am so deeply in his debt.
In the end, Dad was free. He was saved by the Father, and nurtured by the love of Andra Zarins, who transformed his life for 15 years into an adventure full of thanksgiving, and new experiences.
Tim Kent was adored by his children, looked up to by his friends, and cherished by his wife. We will miss him so much. And we will see him again.
In closing, because I haven’t said a word about golf……in my Dad’s journal, written during his time in The Wilderness, he wrote, “God is giving me a mulligan. The Ultimate Mulligan. Enter into a relationship with the one who is the originator of second chances.”
I love you, Dad.
- Skywalker
That’s it, folks. Thank you for reading. I’ll try to keep things coming while we go through this period of grieving. Thank you for your support. The last thing is our new video, which was published on the day of my Father’s funeral. It’s by and focuses on IDENTITY and Luke Skywalker’s journey toward declaring himself a Jedi Knight like his Father before him.
It hit home for me. Check it out.
Lost my Dad a year ago on Nov. 4. Still seems surreal, still think if him most every day. When we're told that grief is a process, they aren't kidding.
Beautifully written, Stephen. I'm glad that you were able to spend time with him before the end. Take all the time you need to grieve.