The Year Between Fathers

Haisley learned to walk in the hallway of an oncology floor.

At the time, it didn’t feel symbolic. It just felt like a small pocket of light in a place that usually holds a lot of heaviness.

She was in that stage where toddlers are determined to move independently but haven’t quite figured out how their legs work yet. So she grabbed onto whatever she could find for balance. Chairs. The edges of tables. People’s legs.

And sometimes her Papa’s hospital walker.

The nurses would smile when they saw her coming, this tiny toddler shuffling down the hallway while Harley slowly made his way beside her. Both of them steadying themselves on the same piece of equipment, moving at about the same pace.

Looking back now, it’s impossible not to see the symbolism in that moment. But when you’re living inside something like that, you don’t usually recognize it for what it is.

You’re just trying to get through the day.

Haisley was born in May of 2023. Harley died in July of 2024, just a little over a year later. Which means that for Jimmy, the first year of becoming a father unfolded alongside the final chapter of his own father’s life.

At the time we didn’t know that was the timeline we were living in. Life rarely announces those overlaps while you’re inside them. You only recognize them later, when you start looking back and realizing how closely everything ran together.

For a little over a year, Jimmy was learning how to be Haisley’s dad while Harley was right there beside him, watching it happen and loving every minute of being her Papa.

Harley had a way of making people feel seen. If you walked into the room, he didn’t start talking about himself. He wanted to know about you. Every time I came through the door, it was the same question.

“How’s Amy?”

Not in a polite way. In a way that meant he genuinely wanted to know.

He was a storyteller, the kind who could hold a room without trying very hard. You’d find yourself leaning forward without realizing it, waiting to hear what happened next. He loved music, loved the Lord, and loved his family in a way that was easy to feel.

And when Haisley arrived, he loved being her Papa.

Her name wasn’t an accident.

Harley’s full name was James Harley Patterson. Long before we were even pregnant, before we were even trying to have a baby, Jimmy and I had already talked about it. If we ever had a daughter, we knew what her middle name would be.

James.

So when she was born, she became Haisley James Patterson — a little girl carrying a piece of her Papa’s name from the very beginning.

At the time it just felt like a meaningful way to honor him. None of us could have imagined how much weight that choice would carry so soon.

Then everything changed very quickly.

On Haisley’s first birthday, something Harley normally wouldn’t have missed for the world, he stayed home. He was hurting badly from what he thought was sciatica and decided he should probably sit the party out and rest. That alone felt unusual. Harley wasn’t someone who skipped family gatherings, especially not something like his granddaughter’s first birthday.

That evening, we got a call from Jimmy’s mom. The pain had become unbearable, and they had decided to go to the ER.

From that phone call to his death, the entire timeline lasted just five weeks.

Lung Cancer.
Inoperable.
Stage 4.

People respond to moments like that in different ways.

Jimmy grieved.

My brain did what it tends to do when things become overwhelming.

It built systems.

Somewhere along the way I slipped into operational mode. There were doctors to coordinate with, appointments to track, information to make sense of. When the timeline is that short, there isn’t much room to pause and sit with the emotional weight of everything that’s happening.

There are simply too many decisions that have to be made.

One of the hardest conversations came when hospice entered the picture.

It was just the three of us in that meeting: Jimmy’s mom, Susan, his sister Katy, and me. Hospice is a word no family ever wants to hear, and no one wants to be the person helping bring it into the conversation. But as the doctors explained what was happening, it became clear that the focus needed to shift from fighting for more time to making the time he had left as peaceful and comfortable as possible.

There was paperwork to sign. Conversations with the VA to navigate. The kind of administrative red tape that somehow still exists even when someone’s life is measured in days instead of years.

It wasn’t a role I had ever expected to play, but it was a privilege to do those things for him.

When Harley passed, only three of us were in the room: Jimmy, Katy, and me. The room had grown quiet in the way hospital rooms sometimes do when everyone understands what’s coming.

And when he took his final breath, it didn’t feel chaotic or frightening.

It felt like he was going home.

For a man who had spent his life loving people, leading worship, and pointing others toward the Lord, I can’t help but imagine the words he heard when he stepped into eternity.

“Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

Music had always been central to Harley’s life. For decades he directed the choir at Ripley High School, shaping generations of students in a small town where music programs often become the heartbeat of a community. At the same time, he served as choir director at his church, pouring the same love and discipline into the voices that filled that sanctuary week after week.

So it felt fitting that when we gathered to remember him, the sanctuary filled with people who had once stood in front of him as students, coming from far and wide to honor the impact he had made on their lives.

And somehow, decades later, they still knew the song by heart.

Every note sung from memory.

His former students came from far and wide to be there.

And when they stood together and began to sing Go Ye Now In Peace, the same song Harley had used to close every choir concert during his years at Ripley High School, it felt less like a performance and more like a benediction.

A final chorus from the students he had spent decades teaching.

Harley’s favorite hymn had always been How Great Thou Art. But that day, the song that carried him out of the room was the one he had used for years to send his own students out into the world.

Go ye now in peace.

Haisley won’t remember walking those hospital hallways beside her Papa. She won’t remember holding onto his walker while she tried to figure out how to take those first steps.

But we will.

And someday we’ll tell her the story — about how her Papa held that walker steady while she learned how to stand, and how the day after we said goodbye to him, she walked on her own for the first time.

Yesterday would have been Harley’s birthday, which is probably why I’m writing this today. Somewhere along the way, after the decisions and the logistics and the memorial services, I’m finally beginning to allow myself the space to grieve — and to acknowledge how unfair it all feels.

Haisley may not remember the time she had with her Papa, but she will grow up surrounded by the love he left behind.

The stories.
The laughter.
The music.
The faith.

The quiet ways his influence still moves through our family.

Love like that doesn’t disappear.

It just keeps walking forward.