Heidi Stevens: Memories of a dad who wasn't mine, but shaped my world, as his family grieves his death

Chicago Tribune

18-04-2025

It started as a Facebook messenger note.
My longtime friend Wendy, who I've known since elementary school — through endless dance recitals and summer camp adventures and a million bad haircuts and a handful of breakups — wrote to tell me her dad had died suddenly. He would have turned 80 on April 14.
Roger DuClos added light and joy to my childhood in a way that is hard to quantify. He taught me to water ski. He made us laugh in church. He had the kindest smile and an adventurous spirit and the patience and quiet competence that made you believe — nope, made you know — you'd be fine. If you tried the scary thing. If you didn't exactly fit in. If you needed a little extra help. If you laughed when you weren't supposed to, like in church.
He was a pilot for Delta Airlines, like my own dad. A career he came to after serving in the military, like my own dad. He was an Air Force instructor pilot on the T-38 Talon (which probably made teaching a scared, skinny kid to waterski seem like a breeze) and before that a football player on scholarship at the University of Arizona.
I didn't know all of that when I was a kid. I knew he was a pilot. I knew he was my friend's dad. I knew he was my dad's friend.
Wendy and I quickly started a trip down memory lane the day she wrote to tell me her sweet dad died. She and her older sister, Jennifer, and I hit the dad jackpot. (The mom jackpot too, I should add. An embarrassment of riches.)
Our dads came to our endless dance recitals and drove us to practices and showed up at our games and taught us stuff that probably tested their patience and made them wonder if their quiet competence skipped a generation. But they hung in there nonetheless, bless their hearts.
There's a Maya Angelous saying: 'People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.'
My dad taught me to change the oil in my car and swap out a flat tire and tie a whole bunch of different knots like they teach you in the U.S. Navy. And I can't tell you that I retained a lot of those details, sadly. But I can tell you that I'll never forget how those lessons made me feel: Believed in. Invested in. Trusted. Capable. Cared for. Worth his time.
Loved.
Wendy and her wonderful mom and sister have been going through her dad's stuff, sorting through a life, planning for a memorial. She sent me an old snapshot of our dads together. I texted it to my dad, who promptly texted back that it looks like it was taken when Roger was getting ready to leave for Delta Airlines 757 school, probably July 1997 or 1998. I texted that to Wendy.
'Tell your dad we found the 767-400ER manuals,' she wrote back. 'In case he wants a refresh.'
Her dad saved everything.
'Every test he ever took in the military,' she wrote. 'EVERY. TEST.'
One day I was in my parents' living room telling stories and my dad quietly left the room and returned with a receipt for the Volkswagen Beetle — two-door, leatherette trim, custom orange paint job — that he bought for my mom on Jan. 27, 1967, exactly one month after their wedding. It cost $2,054.17. (The custom orange paint job was an extra $110.)
There's a mixture of resourcefulness and aptitude and nostalgia in those found objects. And they add up to something magical.
'Even the broken stuff has labels explaining that it's broken but he might use it for parts for something else,' Wendy wrote. 'He legit has a label on every phone cord … RAD lvg rm cord AZ. LCD ktchn cord WI.'
What's it like to see his handwriting, I asked. All those labels. All those tests.
'It makes me cry,' she wrote. 'We used to tell him how uncanny it was that his handwriting and Santa's were the same.'
I'm guessing they'll stumble upon some of Santa's old notes soon. It takes care and organization to hang onto old stuff. But it also takes an understanding that all the little moments and objects and artifacts, no matter how minor, have value. They add up to a life.
Wendy's dad sewed his Walmart watch back together when the band started to fray.
'Because the watch part wasn't broken and why buy a new watch when you can sew the band with red thread,' she wrote. 'He still had a tube TV because it was still working and the DuClos family doesn't buy new stuff unless it was broken and couldn't be fixed by dad.'
What a gift to go through life watching so much be fixed by Dad.
I'm forever grateful for my own dad's modeling in that department. And I'm increasingly aware — as I'm saying more goodbyes to the grown-ups who populated my childhood and showed me what it looks like to take care of your people and made me laugh and made me think and loved my friends into their current, beautiful selves — that I've been lucky beyond belief. Loving, safe grown-ups shape a kid's world in such profound, permanent ways.
I'll miss Mr. DuClos. My missing barely belongs in the same universe of what his family is going through. But I know I get to carry him around in my heart, where he lodged himself early — especially that look when he was about to make us giggle even though we were supposed to be solemn. Life has enough solemn.