Deepest pain of my final conversation with my dad is that it was never finished

My grandmother Eliza was 12 years old when she gave birth to my father, Sebastian Cabot Owens, in the small town of Red Jacket, West Virginia. My grandfather, whom I never met, was a man named Richard who I was told died sometime in his early 20s, when my father was 2. There were no other siblings.  

Like me, my dad was an only child. But very much unlike me, he experienced the kind of childhood that I can’t even begin to imagine – and that he never talked about. When Dad was dying from cancer back in 1975, about a month before I would be leaving home again to finish my last year away at prep school, my grandmother flew out to see her son for the last time.

It was only the third time I had ever seen her or talked to her. When she entered the hospital room, she stood at the foot of the bed for almost the entire time, and the two of them shared very few words. Neither of them smiled, neither of them shed a tear. They just stared deep into each other, their faces so strikingly similar it was almost eerie. A few times I heard Grandma mumble "um-hmm" as though Dad had said something, even though he hadn’t. 

I didn’t understand that distance at the time, especially because those few times I had seen my grandmother she had always given me such a huge hug. So I knew she was capable of warmth. And although my father was definitely the silent type and not overly expressive, I never had any doubt of his love for me or my mother.

But as I look back at that moment in time from the vantage point of a 65-year-old man who has already outlived his father by three years, I believe there was more shared pain and understanding between mother and son during that brief final visit, of just how raw and unfair life can be, than I could have possibly understood at the time. 

Today, when I Google Red Jacket, I find that its population is a little over 500. I see that there are actually tourist attractions in and around the town such as The Mine Wars Museum or the Matewan Depot Replica Museum. 

There is also an excellent YouTube video giving the history of Red Jacket, which was incorporated in 1904 – just nine years before my father was born there in 1913 – built by the Consolidated Red Jacket Coal and Coke Co. Red Jacket is right down the road from Matewan, and those who know their union history know that it was the site of the historic Matewan Massacre on May 19, 1920 – also called the Battle at Matewan – when hired goons opened fire on mine workers to maintain control and prevent labor organizing. It became one of the largest and most brutal labor strikes in history. 

In May of 1920, my dad would have just turned 7 on his birthday in April. What did he see? Did he see anything at all? My great-grandparents, his mother’s mother and her father, an extremely dignified-looking man whom I met twice, took a big hand in helping to raise my father. That probably saved Dad’s life, when I think about it. And now I wonder how much of what happened in that small mining town they let him see – or how much were they able to prevent him from seeing?  

What was it like for a small Black boy born to a poor Black girl in a small predominantly white Southern mining town at the turn of the century? How did he survive, even with his grandparents helping out as much as they could?  

These are just some of the now-overflowing basket of questions that I wish I could ask my father, not only to better understand him but to better understand myself.

The only time he and I got close to having a heart-to-heart was a month before he was diagnosed with cancer.

I was 17, and the door had just started to open wider between us now that I was approaching an age when I could better understand the context of a life that he had been unwilling to share with a young child. We were on a trip in the mountains of Colorado, where he had been invited to participate in the Aspen Institute for the Humanities conference. Mom had fallen asleep on her bed in the hotel room when Dad walked in and asked if I wanted to go for a walk. Maybe I could show him that trail I said I had discovered?

I practically launched out of bed. We stopped on the way to grab a soft drink, then I took him to my favorite location nearby where I would run up and down the side of a hill, training for an upcoming track meet. I figured the high-altitude sprints might give me an edge, even though the meet was many days away. We walked down the trail, then veered near the bottom toward a nearby creek where we stood for a long while and talked and skipped rocks. We had spent time together before, but we rarely shared more than a few words. This was something new and wonderful, something that I didn’t know how much I had needed. Maybe Dad did, too.

That door was slammed shut only weeks later with a violence that still reverberates inside of me today. The deepest pain of that final conversation – the only one we ever really had – is that it was never finished. And so I have been forced to fill in the empty spaces as best I can with what I know.

One of the things I know: Despite it all, somehow, my father overcame.   

He went to college, supplementing his income by washing and ironing the clothes of other students. He washed his own clothes in a sink to save money. Later, he served in the military during World War II, although thankfully he was stationed stateside and didn’t have to see combat like my two uncles, my mother’s brothers, both of whom endured scars that never faded away. 

He met my mother at a USO dance in Chicago, which happened to be the only time my mother ever went to a USO dance, because her mother had warned her that those Army boys could get too fresh and aggressive. Dad was neither fresh nor aggressive. He was quiet and somewhat shy, but as soon as he saw my mother, he was determined. Mom said she could see him working his way over to her around the edges of the dance floor, and then he made sure to keep anyone else from dancing with her. 

Eventually, my dad became executive director of the Colorado Urban League, a role he held for close to three decades, and most of those decades his branch was awarded best branch in the country. He became mentor to such luminaries as Vernon Jordan, who, when he spoke at my dad’s funeral, said, “Sebastian Owens was the kind of man who could tell you to go to hell in such a way that you looked forward to the journey.” 

And then there’s that picture I have of my father at the White House with President Lyndon Johnson. It is a signed photograph, with Dad standing right next to President Johnson, the presidential limousine in the background, and my Uncle Monroe Dowling, one of the first Black men to ever attend Harvard Business School, partially obscured in the background. (I never even knew that photo existed, or that my father had actually met with the president of the United States, until decades after he had passed. I was packing up the house because my mother was in the early stages of dementia and could no longer live on her own. Unfortunately, that meant she was no longer in a condition to tell me the story behind that photo.)

My father was the most remarkable man I ever knew. He accomplished things in his life that no one who knew anything of his beginnings would have ever predicted, or considered remotely realistic. But Dad couldn’t care less whether someone was placing bets on his life, because he bet on himself. 

And he won. 

Keith A. Owens is a local writer and co-founder of Detroit Stories Quarterly and the "We Are Speaking" substack newsletter and podcast. This column first published at the Detroit Free Press.