Gone, but never forgotten...

Get the Point!

May 24, 2000, 25 years ago today, would be the very last time that I would converse with my father, the late Charles Hobbs. The first picture below was taken six months earlier, back before metastatic prostate cancer would ravage his body and zap all of his near Herculean physical strength.

Even as the same body that used to crush opposing football players during his school days at Miami Carver High School and Florida A&M University, and later fight the Viet Cong and NVA in Vietnam, slowly withered to less than 150 pounds, his mind stayed razor sharp to the very end—as did our conversations about any number of subjects under the sun.

But of all the things that I miss the most about my father, a quarter century later, it's our conversations that I miss the most! And the fact that he never got to meet and mentor my daughter, one who inherited our passion for history, current events, and debate; man, those two would have gotten along famously! But such is life—the inevitability of death—and the void that remains long after raw emotions stemming from a close loved one's initial passing finally subsides.

And so it is, 25 years later, that I remember my father and the last promise I made to him that day, which was his request that when he got out of Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, that I would purchase him the biggest lobster dinner I could find and bring it to the house...I choked back tears and replied "yes Sir" even though I knew that he hadn't eaten solid food for several weeks, and that there would be no more lobster dinners for him—and none for me since that day out of solidarity for my hero who was nearing his end and would never share that particular meal with me again… My father would slip into darkness not long after midnight on May 25th, a darkness that provided merciful respite from the pain of cancer and the seeming unbearable cycles of chemotherapy and radiation in what turned out to be a cruelly futile attempt to extend his time on Earth.

Looking back, while he passed a few days short of his 60th birthday, I am so very grateful that in the 59 years that he was granted, that I have never taken for granted the fact that I was born to, raised by, and share the name of a fearless leader who was imperfect, as all humans are, but practically perfect as far as equipping me with many of the necessary tools to navigate "this thing called life" as an intelligent, strong, and resolute Black man in America.

Lest I forget...