My Dad's Story

What I lost at six, what I'm still learning as a man.

I didn't grow up with my dad.
I lost him when I was six.

Most of what I know about him comes in fragments. Stories. Reactions. The way people's voices change when they say his name.

In our family's eyes, he was basically Patrick Swayze in Roadhouse — tough, cool, a little wild, larger than life. A taxidermist from a small town in Kansas who carried that mix of grit and charm you don't really see much anymore.

And then he was gone.

He died by suicide.
We lost him, and I lost the chance to ever really know him.

That's the part of the story that shaped me more than anything else.

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The Man I Never Got to Know

When you lose a parent that young, you don't really lose a person — you lose a possibility.

I don't have long conversations to look back on. I don't have memories of big life talks or father-son moments. I have flashes:

• the way people describe his sense of humor
• the way they talk about how he walked into a room
• the way my family loved him, even with all the pain that followed

He lived with chronic depression.
I didn't know that when I was six. I just knew I had a dad, and then I didn't.

As I got older, I had to piece him together the way you might piece together a story you weren't really old enough to understand when it was happening. You start hearing the words "mental health," "depression," "struggle," and "he was doing the best he could," and you realize your life was shaped by something you didn't even have language for.

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Unrealistic Goals and "How to Be a Man"

When you lose your dad young — especially to suicide — you don't just get grief.

You get this quiet, invisible script:

• Boys don't cry.
• Be tough.
• Handle it.
• Don't be the weak link.

Somewhere along the way, I picked up this idea of "unrealistic goals" around what it meant to be a man.

I thought:

• A man doesn't show his pain.
• A man just works harder.
• A man doesn't ask for help.
• A man holds everything together, no matter what's happening inside.

On the outside, that can look like success.
On the inside, it can feel like you're slowly breaking.

I spent a lot of years chasing achievements, businesses, status — anything that made me feel like I was "doing it right" as a man. But underneath all of that was a kid who never got to say goodbye, never got answers, and never really got to just be sad about losing his dad.

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Saying Goodbye Over and Over

Grief isn't something you do once.
It's something you do in layers.

I've had to say goodbye to my dad over and over at different ages:

• As a teenager trying to figure out why I was angry and restless.
• As a young adult trying to understand why success never felt like enough.
• As a man today, trying to build a life that doesn't run from pain, but walks through it.

I've had to learn how to respect the man he was, even with the parts that hurt.
To see his depression not as a moral failure, but as an illness, a weight, a storm he didn't know how to survive.

I've had to learn how to honor him without repeating his ending.

That's not a clean process. It's messy. Some days it's gratitude. Some days it's anger. Some days it's just a quiet ache.

But inside that process, I started to ask a different question:

Instead of "How do I avoid his story?"
it became "How do I carry his story and do something with it?"

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What His Story Taught Me About Mental Health

My dad's story is why I refuse to treat mental health like a buzzword.

For me, it's not a content niche.
It's not a marketing angle.
It's not a "cause" I picked because it sounded good.

It's the reason I grew up without a father.

It's the reason I care so much about:

• people who are quietly overwhelmed
• men who think they're only allowed to be tough
• families who don't have the language to describe what's happening
• kids who are growing up in the ripple of something they didn't cause

We still don't know everything about what he was carrying.
We don't know what was missed or what he never got access to.
We just know that depression was real, the pain was real, and the loss was real.

That's enough reason for me to build my life around making sure fewer families have to stand where we stood.

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From Kansas to Wyoming, and Into Community

My dad's story starts in small-town Kansas.
My work is rooted in Wyoming.

Both places have this in common:

• strong, stubborn people
• a culture of toughness
• and not always a lot of safe places to say, "I'm not okay."

I've learned that community mental health isn't just about clinics and programs. It's about the conversations we normalize, the spaces we build, and the stories we're willing to tell out loud.

Losing him set off a ripple in my life.
The Goodyear Foundation is my way of choosing what that ripple does next.

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How This Shaped the Goodyear Foundation

The Goodyear Foundation isn't a polished, distant idea for me.
It's personal.

It's built on:

• a dad I barely got to know
• a six-year-old kid who didn't understand suicide
• a long stretch of years trying to prove I was "strong enough"
• and finally, the realization that real strength looks more like honesty, support, and connection

This foundation exists:

• for the kids who are growing up in the shadow of someone else's pain
• for the adults who feel like they're at the end of their rope
• for the families who don't know what to do with words like "depression" or "suicide"

My dad's story doesn't define every part of my life.
But it is one of the reasons I get up and choose this work — to make sure that in Wyoming and beyond, fewer people feel like they have to face their darkest moments alone.

This is one way I keep saying goodbye to him — and one way I keep saying thank you for the parts of him I did get to know, and the parts I only know through the lives he touched.