Hear Me Out...Father's Day

My father, Pete Kuhn, passed away in a mining accident on Oct. 31, 2017. I know, a downer way to start the column but hang with me. This will be the first Father's Day I don't give him a call or celebrate with him, which is weird. Sunday will feel a lot like when his birthday passed, just that sense that I'm forgetting something paired with a hollowness feeling to the day.

While days like his birthday and Father's Day re-emerge the deep pain from the day he passed, it also brings with it wonderful memories from the past.

A quick backstory, my dad isn't my biological father. My biological dad, who was very much a part of mine and my sisters' lives, committed suicide in 2002. (A story for another day). Long story short my dad adopted myself and my sister just before my biological dad ended his life.

It took time for me to realize just how patient and great of a man my dad was. Those were my early teenage years and not the most enlightening part of my life, and in terms of passive-aggressiveness, I could give LeBron James a run for his money during this point in my life.

Once I outgrew that crappy early-teenage stage, it didn't take long to see all the small, big and in between things that my dad did that made him an incredible dad.

During the summer going into my freshman year of high school, I decided I wasn't going to play football. At the time my reasoning was I wanted to focus on basketball, but really I was a wuss and didn't want to get hurt since at the time I was barely cracking 140. My mom was alright with it, she liked watching me play football but didn't want to force me to do something I didn't like. My dad wasn't really on board and said I was going to play football whether I liked it or not. Football was his favorite sport and having played college football at the University of Nevada-Reno and nearly making the Denver Broncos, me not playing football was almost sacrilegious.

I say almost because my dad was a pastor at Grace Southern Baptist in Greybull, so there were worse crimes.

Anyway, these were very tense times in the Kuhn household. Toward the end of summer there was a Christian youth concert in, I believe, Colorado and I went to the concert with some church friends from Worland. On the way back from the concert my mom lets me know my dad, and only my dad, was going to drive me back home.

I prayed so hard for a flat tire after that, I was dreading getting back to Worland because I knew the drive back to Greybull was going to be a 40-minute argument on why I was playing football.

The prayers didn't work and my dad was waiting for me in Worland. After stalling as long as I could by telling him how the trip and concert went, he told me we needed to have a serious discussion about football.

I had so many counter-points locked and loaded, I was prepared for the long haul, but much to my surprise my dad said it was alright that I wasn't going to play football. He went on to apologize for the things he said and how he was wrong to tell me that I was going to play whether I liked it or not. This wasn't a forced apology like my mom threw the gauntlet down on him, he was 100 percent apologetic about his behavior. While I was gone he prayed and that's when God laid it on his heart that he was in the wrong. He didn't make any excuses or give the "Facebook apology" of we're sorry, but nothing is our fault, he owned it.

The next day at church, from his pulpit, he made a public apology which was also a surprise. He didn't need to do that since no one outside our house knew about any of this. I had already accepted his apology during the car-ride home and apologized for the things I said. But that's how my dad rolled. He was upfront about everything and didn't want to pretend to be one of these infallible leaders.

This moment is one of thousands from my father's life that have greatly shaped who I am as an adult, a husband and God-willing, a father one day. He wasn't perfect and he never claimed to be, that was one of the many great qualities he had.

His absence still cuts deeply and there's still some rage left over, that makes me want to smash up an elevator like Kylo Ren. But that's when memories like the one I just shared coming rushing back to balance things out.

So while that phone call on Father's Day won't be happening, I had a great father and that's worth celebrating.