When you live long enough, family changes meaning. When I was young, family seemed almost endless. There were grandparents. Parents. Brothers and sisters. Aunts. Uncles. Twenty-eight first cousins on the Latimer side alone. There were reunions. There were gatherings beneath the live oak trees at Granddad and Grandma Latimer's ranch. There always seemed to be another person at the table. You do not think about the fact that one day many of those chairs will be empty. Then the years begin doing what years do.
Grandparents disappear. Parents disappear. Aunts and uncles disappear. Cousins disappear. Brothers and sisters disappear. Friends disappear. The large family that once seemed permanent becomes smaller.
Wanda
Until her death in August 2026, Wanda was one of my strongest connections to our early years. She remembered people and events I knew, along with years before my own memories began. Losing her meant losing another witness to that shared world.
Ben, Bryan, and Micah
Then there are my sons. Ben, Bryan, and Micah. Ben and Bryan were born during my marriage to Cece. Micah was born during my marriage to Tina. Their childhoods belonged to different periods of my life, and each of them knew a somewhat different version of their father. Ben was born in 1971 while I was in college. Bryan arrived in November 1974 as I was establishing a career, and Micah came during my years at Dow. Each knew me at a different stage of my life.
That is something I understand better now. All three boys had the same father, but they did not necessarily experience the same father. Life was changing me while they were growing up. I was learning. I was succeeding. I was failing. My beliefs were changing. My marriages were changing. And through those different periods of my life, I remained the father of three sons. Whatever mistakes I made along the way, Ben, Bryan, and Micah are permanent parts of my story. They grew up. They built lives of their own.
And one of the strange privileges of growing older is watching your children become adults and realizing that they possess memories of you that you do not possess yourself. To them, I am part of their childhood story just as Hardy and Marie are part of mine. That thought makes a man humble. We never completely control how we will be remembered. We simply live in front of the people we love, day after day, and eventually those days become their memories.