It Wasn't Me
A Love Letter To The Man Who Didn't Need Saving
To a little kid soaked in religious servitude, this man was my breath of fresh air.
That’s the truest sentence I know about my grandfather—Richard—Dick to everyone who knew him. A man who wore gold jewelry without apology, drove too fast, told jokes too loud, ate fig newtons by the sleeve, and moved through the world like he had already decided what it owed him and collected accordingly.
He was not a great role model. I want to say that plainly, because this is not that kind of eulogy. He was abrasive, hot-tempered, given to rage, and entirely self-centered in the way certain men of his generation wore as a badge rather than a flaw. His views on women, on people, on politics—they embarrassed me more than once. He stormed off in a huff when he was hungry or not getting his way. He was not built for quiet rooms, measured conversations, or the kind of self-examination that would later become my life’s primary occupation.
And I loved him with a fierceness I never once told him about.
I grew up inside systems of careful performance. The people around me were presentable, measured, curated for public consumption. What you said, how you said it, and to whom you said it all mattered enormously. Feelings were managed. Appearances were maintained. The architecture of our social world was built on the implicit agreement that we would all pretend, a little, all the time.
And then there was Grampy.
He didn’t curate anything. He didn’t manage anything. If he didn’t like you, he told you. If he didn’t like what you were doing, he told you and then probably got angry at you. He walked through life doing what he wanted, when he wanted, at whatever volume felt right to him in that moment. He was the same man in every room he entered. I didn’t have language for it then, but what I was experiencing was something I would spend decades chasing in every relationship I’d ever have:
Authenticity—The radical, unnerving, completely unglamorous kind.
For a kid whose reality was constantly being reframed and questioned, whose internal compass was always being recalibrated by the adults around him, Dick Wadsworth was a fixed point. I always knew where I stood with him. That certainty—even when it was uncomfortable, even when it came wrapped in a side comment that made my face go hot—was safety. It was the most honest thing in my world.
I was taught to distrust him.
Not in those exact words, but the message was clear enough: this man was a heathen. Anti-religion. Anti-God. His lifestyle was a cautionary tale, his disregard for the divine a source of quiet sorrow for the more faithful members of our family. I was supposed to love him and pity him simultaneously, to hold him at an arm’s length, to pray for him and be careful not to be influenced by him.
The problem was that my body didn’t receive that memo.
My body knew what it knew: that in his presence, something went still. That the constant low-level hum of trying to read the room, trying to be the right version of myself, trying to track what was expected—it quieted. He didn’t need me to perform. He didn’t need me to be careful. He just needed me to show up, and sometimes watch Walker Texas Ranger with him on that stiff sofa while he ate fig newtons in his worn recliner. And that was enough.
The people at my church would die before they let you see who they really were. My grandfather couldn’t have hidden himself if he tried, and I don’t think it ever occurred to him to try.
He didn’t need God. He was the god of his own life, and that was good enough for him. And to my young, bewildered, always-performing self—it was good enough for me too.
There are specific images that survive everything else.
Him on a golf course—stiff, frail, probably shouldn’t still be out there—and then the moment he stepped up to the ball. Something happened when he made contact. The stiffness dissolved. The frailty disappeared. The club moved through the air with a precision and authority that made you feel you had badly misjudged this man, that you had filed him somewhere too small. He could shame anyone hitting a golf ball. I watched people recalibrate their entire assessment of him in the space of one swing.
I understood that feeling. I’d been recalibrating my assessment of him my whole life.
The snowmobiles in the garage. Always something juiced up waiting for winter racing. The car stereo with steering wheel controls he’d use to “magically” adjust the volume with a wave of his hand, watching your face the whole time to see the exact moment you’d fall for it. He thought he was hilarious. He was. I was less interested in the punchline of his jokes than in watching him set it up—the way his eyes would go a little bright, the way he’d barely contain himself.
Christmas was his element. Something about the permission of it—the collective agreement that we were allowed to be joyful today—unlocked something in him that was always there but didn’t always have an outlet. His energy was liberating. His laugh was the kind that started somewhere low in the room and pulled everyone else in before they even knew what they were laughing at.
His arm on my shoulder. The most random things would come out of his mouth, and I’d fold.
I was sitting on the edge of my bed when the call came.
“Grampy has passed away.”
I hadn’t seen him in years. His health had been declining and my father and his brother had gone to see him, and a part of me—a significant part—had chosen not to go. I’ve sat with that choice since. The honest answer is that I didn’t want the memory of a fragile, dying man to overwrite the one I already had. I wanted to keep him as he was: gold jewelry, rose-tinted glasses, full of bad jokes and inappropriate commentary and that particular brand of charisma that made a room feel like something was finally happening in it.
Did he miss me in those last years? Probably not. He didn’t miss much in life, except beer, golf, and pretty women. That was not cruelty. That was just Dick being Dick.
So I sat on the edge of that bed and felt like two people were holding my body in a vice. I couldn’t cry right away. Too many things were trying to occupy the same space—grief, relief, guilt, love, and that old complicated static of a man I was supposed to distrust who had been one of the safest presences of my childhood. None of them were winning. They all just stalled.
From the outside, I probably looked like I felt nothing.
It took me months. Years, really. Some of it I’m still processing.
The photo lives in the front flap of an old ESV Bible I still keep around.
I know exactly where it is. I know exactly how to find it when I need it. I pull it out from time to time and smile and cry and laugh, usually all three inside the same minute.
It’s the perfect picture of him. Gold jewelry, rose-tinted glasses, and his hands up in that gesture of sarcastic, theatrical innocence—the one which always preceded or followed the phrase he deployed more than any other in his entire life:
“It wasn’t me.”
We always knew damn well it was him.
I think about the specific irony of that photo living where it lives. The unrepentant heathen, preserved inside the Holy Scripture. The man I was warned not to be influenced by, filed away between the Psalms and the Prophets where I keep the things that matter most. It’s funny.
My system has always known the difference between what I was told to trust and what was actually trustworthy. That capacity—the one that reads a room through the body before the mind has caught up, the one that knows safety not by its credentials but by how it feels—that capacity learned itself, in part, in a worn recliner next to a man eating fig newtons.
He was misunderstood, I think. Not because people read him wrong, exactly. More because he didn’t know himself well enough to offer a better interpretation. He walked through life presenting exactly what he was, without explanation or apology or the slightest interest in being understood more deeply. Most people took what was on the surface and stopped there.
I never stopped there.
I don’t know what he made of me. I don’t know if he knew how much of myself I built in the spaces he made safe. I never told him. I was a kid who didn’t have the language yet, and by the time I had the language, the years had done what years do.
What I know is this: somewhere in the archive of everything that shaped me, there is a man in gold jewelry, rose-tinted glasses, hands up, and eyes bright with the setup of a joke I’m about to fall for.
It wasn’t me.
It was absolutely him. And I would give a great deal to sit on that stiff sofa one more time and let it be.
— Jeff