My Dad, the way I want to remember him.
This evening, just before dinner with my family in Highlands, N.C., we’ll walk down behind my dad’s house and scatter his cremains into the Cullasajuh River. The current will take him downstream, winding through the mountains he loved so much. It feels like a fitting goodbye.
Toward the end of his life, one of the things that bonded us most was … bourbon, or more accurately, Tennessee whiskey. Not fancy bottles or Glencairn glasses, but Jack Daniel’s No. 7 and a can of Coke Zero, mixed together in a cup on the way home from dialysis. He had that treatment three times a week, and each one left him tired, drained, and needing something simple to lift him back up. That cup became his ritual, his little reward for fighting through another session.
The simple black cup that holds more than bourbon and Coke Zero. It holds precious memories.
At first, it wasn’t much—plastic or styrofoam cups with thin straws, the kind you’d toss in the trash at a gas station. But one day, my stepmother, Carol, asked me to go pick him up, and I couldn’t help thinking he deserved better. This wasn’t a throwaway moment. This was his pour. So I stopped at Walmart, found a sturdy black insulated cup with a screw-top lid, and put his Jack and Coke Zero inside. From that day forward, it became his cup. For the next two years, that was the only way he wanted his ritual served.
Now the black cup sits on top of our china cabinet, not as a container for soda and whiskey but as a vessel of memory. It reminds me of the dignity he deserved, the small joys he clung to, and the bond we shared in those final years.
And every so often—on his birthday, or on a day when I want to feel especially close to him—I’ll take it down and pour a Jack and Coke Zero just the way he liked it. It won’t be an everyday ritual anymore, but a sacred one: a way to honor my dad, to feel him beside me, and to remember that sometimes the most meaningful pours aren’t the ones we linger over for flavor notes, but the ones that carry us through life and keep us connected to the people we love.
Copyright © 2025 Doug DeBolt.
