My father sat up and looked down the columns of my sixth-grade progress report, each grade in each class, like he did every semester.
I think a football game was on the TV, maybe the Iron Bowl. It was dim, kind of ominous, but at least they hadn’t stuck too many tubes in Dad’s arm at the time. The machines softly beeped on occasion, nothing too alarming as he reviewed my report from his sterile bed in his sterile room.
A 95 in English, 94 in science, 96 in elective.... and a 90 in math. Just a point above a B.
What he said next, I carry to this day.
“Chris, these grades are excellent. I’m proud of you. Some kids would kill to have grades like these. But you can do better.”
…..
We had become quite familiar with the hospital in a short amount of time. Just a week prior, life was normal. Dad was a sales manager, Mom was a substitute teacher, and every day around 3:45 p.m., I got off the bus, walked down the driveway, and opened the front door.
One afternoon in mid-November, 2001, things weren’t the same.
The 12-year-old me walked in to find Dad doubled over sitting on the couch, Mom by his side, with paramedics on the way. Dad was apparently suffering from chest pain and difficulty breathing, which we’d later find out was the result of a blood clot issue.
It’s an unsettling feeling when you hear an ambulance in the distance and know they’re actually coming to your house for your loved one.
A week from Dad’s hospital admittance and the day after Thanksgiving, Mom returned to the house after a routine visit, this time with my aunt and uncle.
Mom hurried my 8-year-old brother and me into their bedroom. The prayers must have worked, I thought. These were tears of joy, not tears of another, scarier chapter, or worse. This man, my father, meant so many things to us. He was a hometown hero; he was my hero; he was everyone’s hero and he had finally won.
“Boys,” she said, “I think....”
……
Whatever she was about to say, it couldn’t be that bad for a father I knew to be invincible. Just a few weeks before the hospital, he had begun taking me to work out at the YMCA, where I watched him bench press 250 pounds, not bad for a slim 44-year-old past his prime.
Dad—Carlton Derrett—was even badder back in the day. He earned a football plus track and field scholarship to Rice University and took fifth place in the 1977 Division I 100-meter dash final. He only got beat by soon-to-be Olympians. Staying the course in the classroom, he became the first Derrett to graduate from a four-year university.
We didn’t see a ton of Dad growing up, but that’s because he was often traveling for work with the Miller Brewing Company. By the time that mid-November afternoon came in 2001, I had been born in Texas and lived in Arkansas, Nevada, California, Georgia, and Alabama—all part of the corporate grind Dad worked through to be able to provide for and love his family.
He was a rock who taught me about toughness and greatness. No matter what, he would find a way.
…..
“Boys, I think....”
I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear how much longer he’d be in the hospital—another week, a few weeks, Christmas next month? I didn’t want to hear that he’d be back in the ICU or in another induced coma. I was tired and sad of us showing him pictures from the last week and him thinking he was seeing them for the first time.
There was no way Mom could say anything more impossibly, unfairly, horribly screwed up than that. And then she did.
“Boys, I think we lost him.”
Because blood thinners wouldn’t work due to an allergic reaction, the doctors had installed physical filters in my dad to prevent blood clots from going to the heart. One got through, and that was it.
November 23, 2001. He was 44.
Life changed. Dad wasn’t ever coming home.
The day we all stood on the starting line for seventh-grade track tryouts at Cinco Ranch Junior High, in Katy, Texas, I figured I’d blow everyone away like my dad did. I was mistaken.
We had moved to Katy in 2002, the school year after Dad's passing. In this uncomfortably new phase, I tried to be like Dad in every way I could think—hardly shedding a tear in the visitation or funeral, playing the new kid role with as brave a face as possible, and eyeing a college track scholarship.
I was maybe the ninth or tenth fastest guy that seventh grade season.
By eighth grade, with the help of a little (and I mean, like, 5-foot-8) growth spurt, I was a regular on the relay teams and collected a shoebox of little medallions won throughout the season.
By ninth grade, coach made me a 300-meter hurdler and watched my potential soar with each ninth grade division 300 hurdle win on the season. Then I tripped and fell in the district final.
By the fall of tenth grade, I felt my first muscle pull, a quadricep if I remember correctly. I spent the season injured, watching my friends from the stands.
By the fall of eleventh grade, I began to consider what I wanted out of life and out of high school. Track became merely an expectation of others I was trying—and failing—to live out.
By senior year, I was out of track and into sports journalism—my dream career since seventh grade—as an intern at the local Katy Times, class of 2008. I covered state tournament games, made memories with my Trinity Baptist Church youth friends, mentored for a class period at a local elementary school, and all-in-all did more that year than the previous three combined.
Life changed. I wasn’t going to earn an athletic scholarship, or go to Rice.
The internship became clips for a sports writer job application as a sophomore at Baylor University, for the Baylor Lariat student newspaper. Landing the sports writer job eventually became the foundation for being named Editor in Chief as a senior.
Save for the journalism lessons, sand volleyball games, senior house parties, and memories with friends, I didn't feel much had dramatically shifted along the way at Baylor. I knew what I wanted to do, and knew I would get there.
I thought maybe life had finally stopped changing so dang much.
But the spring of 2012, I was sitting in a press box in Oklahoma City, covering the Big 12 baseball tournament for leisure two weeks after graduating from Baylor.
My brother called me, and he never calls, I thought.
“I have some bad news, man,” he said. “I think Mom....”
No. No, no, no, no, no. Not again. Life was good; everyone was ready to launch into adulthood. And Mom had spent the past 10 years as a single mother making sure I had both an incredible mother and dependable friend in her to start life after college.
…..
I don’t remember if I was in high school or middle school when the phone rang one afternoon. It was Mom, who left the house a few minutes prior.
"I forgot to tell you I love you before I left," she said.
I guess I replied with a "well, alright then, love ya too!"
That foundation of love carried into college, as her weekly calls to me at Baylor slowly but surely turned from a short, begrudging chat on my end to a back-and-forth friendship where I confided everything.
Mom—Sylvia Trono Derrett—taught me how to love God, family, friends, strangers, and myself. My grandmother later recalled the time Mom walked across the H.E.B. grocery store parking lot to give a homeless man some money.
"I asked her, 'Why did you walk all the way over to the other side of the parking lot and back?" Grandma told me. "[Mom] said, 'If that were my son, I would hope somebody would be there to help him.'"
Mom was a teacher her whole career after graduating from Texas A&M University. My senior year of high school, during a school project where we had to interview a parent, she imparted some of the most important advice I carry to this day:
“I know that you in particular, Chris, are like I am. You are focused on one career, journalism, as I was focused on teaching. And you're good at what you do. ... For most of my teaching years, I was not happy. So my advice to you is simply leave yourself open for change. I never did. And I regret that a lot. ... Just leave yourself open. And the world is not going to be disappointed in you. That's the way I felt. … You've got to follow what you know is right for you.”
At the time of the interview, I felt like a quitter, having quit track as a junior and quit my grocery store job the summer before senior year. I also had no idea what the heck else I could do besides journalism. She had the perfect response for that, too.
“You know, sometimes Chris, sometimes your talents can be embedded where you won't know until you try. You say you're terrible at math and you hate science. But you probably know enough math, and this is just a far-reaching example, for example you probably know enough math to be able to teach a third-grade math class.”
“You haven’t quit anything because you were defeated. You quit things because they weren’t right for you. … As Mr. Brimberry tells Jared (one of my best friends to this day), your goal in life should always be to give whatever you do your best. …You are your own best judge.”
…..
I can still hear Mom’s words in 2008 as distinctly as my brother’s words on the phone call four years later.
“….I think Mom might be dead.”
Four years, several newspaper bylines and a college degree after my interview with her, she was gone from this earth in her sleep. The coroner could find nothing medically wrong and could only list “natural causes” on her death certificate.
May 23, 2012. She was 54.
We buried her a few days later, beginning a summer of job searching, post-death-account-organizing, and my relentless positivity tested everyday by a burning, unanswered, “How?” and “Why?”
Life changed. I wasn’t going to dance with my mom at my wedding.
A wedding, of course, was just a hypothetical many years away, if at all, I figured.
I sat alone in 2014 in my apartment in Kerrville, Texas, a town of about 20,000 in the Texas Hill Country outside of San Antonio. My eyes and mind reread the same verse over and over.
The passage was from the book of Judges, chapter 18. A dude named Micah builds himself a shrine with idols and hires a personal priest to make himself feel secure in his religion. A tribe, the Danites, comes along, and they take his idols and priest.
“He (Micah) replied, ‘You took the gods I made, and my priest, and went away. What else do I have? How can you ask, ‘What’s the matter with you?’’”
In the study Bible I was using, the footer notes described that verse as, “The agonizing cries of one whose faith is centered in helpless gods.”
That hit hard.
…..
I had reached Kerrville a few years into post-graduation adulthood. After graduating in 2012, I started a non-sports, page designer role at the Dallas Morning News that summer. By early 2014, I finally decided that embarking on a sports career would take a big leap. Kerrville is where I landed as Sports Editor.
Throughout 2014, sports writing was the only goal. It was the only dream I had ever known, and the only way I knew how to both fulfill my self-expectations and not let down all the friends and family who supported us.
I stayed in Kerrville for a year then moved up to the Victoria Advocate, a newspaper in 60,000-population Victoria, Texas, which served as a regional hub for several towns in South Texas. All the while, the lack of work-life balance, dwindling industry prospects, and exhaustion kept eating at me.
And that verse. The idols. What were my idols? What was truly important to me? I began to pray and contemplate.
Then it finally hit in 2015. I had no idea where it would take me, but it was time to surrender this sports writing dream, open myself up to other job possibilities, and embrace time with all the people surrounding me the whole time.
Life changed. I wasn’t ever going to cover a Super Bowl.
My heart raced as I typed the words. The anxiety had become too great, the anger too overboiling, the feeling of muteness too loud in my head.
It was May 31, 2020, and I had been working as a communications specialist at St. Andrew United Methodist Church since August 2016. After surrendering the dream of sports writing, my job search resulted in a few interviews at St. Andrew and a life-giving job offer that took me out of Victoria, back to Dallas.
From August 2016 to March 2020, I explored everything I could – opportunities to serve, increased job responsibilities, putting up with youth group teens who taught me much more about this next generation than I taught them about life, a few failed romantic relationships, travel to here and there—things that would make anyone think this late 20s guy was living his best life. And I felt like I was.
Then COVID happened. And George Floyd was murdered. We were thrust into an environment of unrest. Some of us had the privilege of stepping away if we wished; others, including people of color, had to live in the discomfort like we always had before. The security I spent years building—spontaneity and wildly stupid adventures, as well as the privileged, sheltered life I lived as a black man with a college education and almost all white friends—all that was gone.
“But right now, we’re talking about skin color,” I typed during the most terrifying, emotionally draining writing experience of my life. “It’s not a conversation that involves polished, practiced responses. It’s a lot of raw anger and complete exhaustion. Simply put, we’re pissed and spent.”
I was exhausted from being silent on issues I realized have been in my heart since I was in preschool. The world wasn't fun and games anymore, no matter how much some insisted that's all we needed. I needed to reveal, and I felt others needed to hear, the racism I have encountered and the feelings I spent my childhood and young adulthood masking.
At the end of 2020, I decided it was time to share what I believe to be my gifts and calling by developing this website. The first tab after the intro would be this page, My Story. The next would be the Reflections I’ve had in the process of getting here.
Beyond that, you’ll see the opportunities I’ve been given to share other people’s stories. Hopefully you’ll see what comes when we experience love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control. Maybe we can see some joy, pure joy, even when we face trials of many kinds.
I thank my wife Mary, Mom, Dad, my brother Marc, every family member, friend, believer, and reader of this story for shaping me into the person I am.
Life changes. I will embrace every moment I can. Much love to you all, and enjoy these stories.