People talk about the things that make them lose sleep. Sometimes it’s family drama, or maybe the war in Iran or one of the ’Stans, or AI causing the extinction of humanity…but many times, it’s work.

Every now and then somebody at the office will tell me that I shouldn’t “lose any sleep over that.” I am usually pretty quick to respond, “Oh, I won’t. Trust me – I don’t lose sleep over much, and work is definitely not one of those things.”

I’m not being cute or snarky – I mean it. I have been doing this long enough that I am pretty good at compartmentalizing things.

Important. Urgent. Background noise. Things that need to be dealt with right now and things that can wait until tomorrow or next week. Or things that I need to make sure get to the right person to deal with.

Look – there’s a mattress on the interstate. But I digress…

For whatever reason, I find it relatively easy to do that with work. I find it much harder to do with the rest of my life.

Maybe that is just part of trying to put your family first. Trying to be a good husband. A good father. A good brother. A good cousin. A good son.

Although I guess I cannot really talk anymore about actively being a good son. Both of my parents are gone now.

That is still a strange sentence to write.

For most of my life, being a son was not merely something I was. It was something I had to do. Sometimes quite literally.

When Ashley and I lived in Augusta, I can remember Daddy calling me most Sunday evenings. Those calls could last an hour. Sometimes longer. Usually the kids were already in bed. Ashley and I would be in our bedroom winding down for the night, sometimes already laid down in bed ourselves, and my phone would ring.

Daddy.

The conversation would almost always end up somewhere in our family tree. He had talked to somebody. Or heard something about somebody. Or remembered somebody. And pretty soon we were five generations deep into a discussion about how we were kin to a person whose name I may or may not have ever heard before.

Daddy knew all of that stuff. Who married whom. Who somebody’s daddy was. Where they lived. Who their grandparents were. Which branch of the family they came through. And he would explain it all to me, sometimes at length.

I wish I could tell you that I sat there fascinated by every word.

But I was not.

There were plenty of Sunday nights when I wanted that hour back. I wanted to talk to Ashley. I wanted to go to sleep. I wanted some time to myself. Sometimes I would put Daddy on speakerphone, lay the phone on my chest and let him talk. And sometimes, if I am being completely truthful, I was not listening all that closely.

I loved Daddy so much. I also occasionally wished he would get off the phone.

Both things were true.

But what I would give for one of those phone calls now…and not just because I would like to hear his voice again. I have questions. So many questions.

I wish I had asked him more about his life before he settled down. I wish I knew more about his time running the paper in Coosa County. I wish I had asked him what he actually thought when he got drafted into the Army after he had already earned a college degree and was trying to get on with his life. I wish I knew more about what he was like before he was my Daddy.

I wish I had asked him how in the world he managed to work as his wife’s boss for decades and (1) keep his job and (2) live to tell about it. That one alone was probably worth several Sunday-night phone calls.

I wish I had asked him more about money. Momma and Daddy never had a mortgage payment, and yet they always seemed to struggle to make ends meet. Where did it all go?

Some of it I know. They were generous. Sometimes probably more generous than they could afford to be. And that generosity did not seem to slow down as they got older or as they had less.

But there are parts of that story I do not know. There are parts of lots of stories I do not know.

Daddy told me some of them. But I just have fractured pieces of some. A name here. A reference there. Something somebody did in 1968. Somebody’s grandmother who was apparently my third cousin twice removed or my second cousin three times removed or that we were somehow kin to Rosalyn Cater, or maybe just somebody Daddy knew and decided I should know about too.

I understood that he was carrying around a family archive in his head – but I didn’t really ever think about that time in the future when that archive would inevitably close.

With Momma, it was different.

Every now and then I would call her for no particular reason. Not because something had happened. Not because I needed anything. Just to talk. Most of the time when I did that I was on my way home from work and had just finished my 27th phone call of the day.

And she would say something like, “Oh, well, I just didn’t expect you to call. I know you’re so busy.”

She was not being mean. She was not laying a guilt trip on me. That almost made it worse, because every time she said it, it hurt my feelings a little bit. Clearly I did not call often enough for an unexpected phone call from me to seem ordinary.

And obviously I should have.

There are several lines in several country songs about taking calls from or calling your momma…and each of those hits me directly in the face now.

But being a son was not just phone calls. There were tools. I feel like there were always tools.

At some point in almost every conversation with Daddy or Momma before we went back home for a holiday event or just to visit, one of them would mention something that needed to be repaired.

“Next time you come, can you look at…” or “Can you bring your tools?”

There was always something wrong with one of the houses. Something leaking. Something loose. Something broken. Something that had stopped working.

So as we loaded up the kids and whatever else we were bringing home for the weekend, I would throw some tools in there too because I knew at some point during the visit I was going to be fixing something. Sometimes for hours.

I was almost always happy to help. I was also occasionally a little aggravated about it. There were times when going home for a family event felt like arriving for a maintenance outage.

I would think, can I please just come home one time without bringing a tool bag?

But that was part of being their son. They needed something fixed, and if I knew how to fix it then I fixed it. If I didn’t know how, I would just figure it out. My brain just works that way.

But I never thought much about any of that while I was doing it. Just like I never thought much about Daddy’s phone calls. Or Momma sounding surprised that I called.

It was ordinary.

Sometimes mildly inconvenient. Sometimes an obligation. Sometimes something I did happily. Sometimes something I did a little begrudgingly.

Most of life seems to happen that way.

The important things do not always announce themselves as important while they are happening. Sometimes they just interrupt your Sunday evening.

The day after Momma died, I saw my mother-in-law, Lesa, and as I was sobbing in her arms, at some point I told her that she and Mike were all I had left now.

I did not mean that I had nobody. I have Ashley. I have my children. I have my brother. I have family and friends and more people who love me than I deserve.

But the generation above me is disappearing. Daddy is gone. Momma is gone. And with them went something I do not think I fully understood while I still had it.

I spent 44 years being somebody’s son.

I still am. I always will be.

But there is nobody left who needs me to do it.

Nobody to call and check on. Nobody to remind me to bring my tools the next time I come home. Nobody to tell me some story I have already heard three times. Nobody to explain how I am related to somebody whose name I will forget five minutes later. Nobody to be surprised when I call.

If my phone rang next Sunday evening and somehow it was Daddy, I am pretty sure the first thing that would surprise him is that I probably would not let him do all the talking. I have a lot to catch him up on.

Ashley. The kids. My work. Everything that has happened. Everything that is happening. All the things he would want to know.

And after I got through telling him all of that, I think I would probably apologize. I would tell him I was sorry I did not do a better job of listening to him on those Sunday-night phone calls.

Then I would start asking questions.

And I would probably leave the phone on speaker while I laid in the bed…but I would be listening.