Strong. Brave. Daring.

The following was a column that Parker wrote shortly after his father passed away. It ran in the Dec. 24 issue of the Bozeman Chronicle.

It had been years since I’d seen my dad naked.

But after mom died and Dad left Florida to move in with my daughter and her family in Livingston, he needed assistance bathing.

We’d bought him a shower chair, and I’d help him take off his clothes, step into the tub and sit down. He could still soap himself and then I would rinse him off, towel him dry and get him dressed.

He’d thank me in a shaky voice and tell me he wasn’t comfortable with anybody else giving him a bath. I’d say “no problem,” tell him I was glad to do it.

Truth is, I wasn’t glad to do it. It made me a little uncomfortable. Not the fact that he was naked so much as that he was old, shrunken, weak, scarred. He even had difficulty standing.

I saw my own mortality in this tiny, frail man.

Then I remembered the last time I’d seen him naked. I must have been 14 or 15, and we had hiked down to the Ohio River together so I could show him where my friends and I were planning to camp.

He wanted to check it out and I had reluctantly agreed to take him. He and I had always hunted, fished and gone camping together, but I’d reached an age where hanging out with your dad wasn’t too cool. I preferred the company of my friends, a few of whom could already drive.

I’d found the spot a couple of years earlier, a sandy bluff 10 feet above the muddy flow of the Ohio, which stretched a mile wide to the far Kentucky shore.

It was a hot summer day. Dad said “let’s swim,” and started taking off his clothes.

I’d been skinny-dipping before, but never with my old man. I remember being a bit hesitant, but Dad wasted no time, stripped down and dove headfirst off the bluff.

I joined him in the river and we swam together like we had ever since I was little, except this time we were naked and that made it seem like a grown-up guy thing to do.

He had, after all, fought in a war in a foreign land, and he could still whip me.

We never went skinny-dipping again. And until I began bathing my frail, grieving father a few years ago, we were always clothed in each other’s presence.

Dad died Monday, Dec. 18 in Livingston. He was 90.

I can still see him buck naked, diving off that cliff into the Ohio River. Strong. Brave. Daring. All I aspired to be. I was proud he was my dad.

The image of that frail, old man has already begun to fade.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]