Last month, I called my dad to tell him that I was going to put down Sage, a black lab I’ve had for 15 years. He sighed, then paused before acknowledging the difficulty of the decision.
“But it’s what is best,” dad said. “It’s not about you, Kurt. It’s about doing what’s humane. Call me if you need to chat about it some more.”
His candor was what I needed to hear right then. In fact, it’s what I’d heard from him my entire life.
And that conversation plays on repeat in my mind, because it would be one of our last. My dad, Brooks Lee, passed away several days later at the age of 62.
I was fortunate to have a father present in my life every day. For a lot of black males, that’s not necessarily the case.
Progress through the generations was something my dad believed in, wholeheartedly. After he graduated from high school in 1967, his father — who never received any more than a high school education — wanted him to continue on, but couldn’t afford to send him to college.
“I can’t pay for school,” my grandfather told him, “but I can put a roof over your head and food on the table if you work and send yourself to school.” My dad took up the offer. He worked full-time and took night classes, eventually earning a two-year certificate in electronic computer programming before he joined the Army.
“Take it seriously,” he said of higher education. “Because in the end, it’ll only make things better for you.”
From elementary school through high school, my dad was there at every parent-teacher conference, no matter how well I did. He knew, as Horace Mann said, that education is the great equalizer of the conditions of men. He showed us how important it was, how important it should be to my brother Michael and I.
He was in his 40s — while working and supporting his family — when he graduated from Regis University with a bachelor’s degree in computer information technology.
When I graduated from college in my early 20s, he beamed with pride. “You did what you were supposed to at an early age,” he said.
It was about progress.
In Colorado, 60 percent of black males graduate from high school, about 20 percentage points lower than whites. In 2011, a little more than 400 black males with in-state residency graduated from higher education institutions here in Colorado.
A nauseating statistic, one that is a gateway to more sociological constraints — poverty, crime and incarceration.
It’s hard to imagine life without my dad pushing me to excel in school and as a person.
He was not a perfect man, none of us are. Yet he always stressed following your “true north,” which he described and instilled in me as honesty, respect, being a man of your word and — no matter what — love for those closest to you. He would say that sometimes we deviate from our “true north.”
“But as long as you always know where it’s at, and you don’t stray far from it, then you’ll be OK,” he’d say.
He always had the right words to say, and as a father, he knew when I needed to hear them.
After graduation, when I moved to Washington, D.C. — with no job secured, just a resume, a couch to crash on and confidence — he supported my decision.
“You’re qualified, Kurt. You’ll make it happen,” he said. And I did.
And it continued on into my career, which now finds me here as a reporter for The Denver Post.
It’s because he was always there for me, with the right words and actions, because as a father, he knew it was critical to my success.
Kurtis Lee (klee@denverpost.com) is a reporter at The Denver Post.
