On December 6, 1944 – Grover Clinton Bryant Jr. was born to Eva and Clinton Bryant of Weems, Virginia. Weems is a small village on the Northern Neck that sits on the shores of the Rappahannock River. It’s small. Real freaking small. It’s where he and my mom grew up. On November 24, 2021, Grover, my dad, passed away peacefully in his home in Poquoson, Virginia.

Not to sound morbid, but the thought of my father’s passing has been on my mind for well over a decade. When I was working at USA Wrestling around 2011, he called and told me he was diagnosed with bladder cancer. He was already undergoing care and he seemingly beat it shortly thereafter. But year after year, it kept coming back. Cancer popped up again in his liver, esophagus and lymph nodes later on. He lost weight but kept fighting. He fought for 11 years.

The last month was rough. He fell twice and grew weaker. Just two weeks after doctors gave him six weeks to put his feet up and be comfortable, he was gone.

I’m someone who feels the need to remember those who have left us. I don’t particularly “like” the thought of attending funerals. In fact, I’m usually a wreck when attending one, even by people I barely knew. Sometimes out of respect or sometimes just out of the pain I see in others. Sometimes I’m overly empathetic.

My mom and dad divorced when I was four. They both remarried.  My mom two years later and my dad remarried his first wife almost 30 years after he married her the first time. Her name was Marina and she was the mother of my older sister Debbie. I joke about my southern roots some, because when my dad remarried Marina, Debbie went from my half sister to my half sister and step sister – whom I jokingly called my three-quarter sister.

I spent weekends and birthdays at my dad’s house in Newport News growing up. He moved to Poquoson first, then my mom and the rest of us moved about a year later. I really never was more than a couple miles from him growing up. But those younger years saw a bit of distance. He was never mean to me, in fact, despite knowing the circumstances about why my parents divorced, he never did me wrongly. To that point, he also wasn’t the most attentive, but to be fair, I wasn’t exactly banging down the door. We just kind of co-existed in the same area. I look back at my teen years with some regret. I wasn’t exactly the nicest to my stepmother and I was forgetful. I know the maddest I ever heard my dad was when I forgot to get Marina a card for her birthday – something he’d specifically asked me to do. I might have been 13 or 14.

She passed away in July of 2003, just weeks before I was to start my final year in college. Some of you know I should have graduated much earlier. Another regret I have is her not being able to see me walk across the stage at that school in Norfolk. She was old school. My dad was old school. They jived well and reconnected when Debbie moved back across the country in the early 1990s.

When she passed away, it was my mom’s idea that I ask to move in with him while I got my feet under me as a recent college graduate. I had just started my first full-time job, working at the Daily Press, the local newspaper where I’d been working part-time since high school. I moved in about a year after Marina’s passing and there was where my relationship with my dad, which was closely distant before, blossomed.

Grover worked at the Newport News Marine Terminals in crane maintenance. He was one of the smartest people you’d ever meet, but he worked hard and came home with grease under his nails and his hands dirty every day. Like clockwork, he came home from work at 5:45.

By the time November had arrived, I was disenfranchised by the newspaper,