Today is the day that we remember people we loved who died on active duty serving their country. My dad is one of those people. He died in an unexplained crash of an F4 Phantom fighter jet during a training mission. I found the crash site last fall and wrote about it here.

Memorial Day is usually hard for me because it’s a time when people feel free to say what his death and the deaths of so many others mean. And while this is normal, even the purpose of the shared civic ritual, all the losses of people we love resist collapsing down into a single story of serving one’s country and dying for others.

Other losses

My wife, Melody’s, grandmother was a twin. She lost her twin
brother to a plane crash somewhere over the Himalayas in World War 2. She always held out hope that he had somehow survived the crash and had built a life there on the other side of the world. It was the NPR story of another family looking for crashed WWII planes by asking local hunters if they knew of any crashed planes that led me to Arkansashunting.net where ultimately found people who helped me find the spot where my dad died.

When we don’t get a chance to see the body, there’s always a crack of hope for our mind to wonder at. I think this is part of why it was so important for me to find where my dad died. I never believed he survived but I fantasized about it sometimes. His death and life were never as real to me as when I was walking the woods pulling up pieces of airplane, flight suit and boot.

Other stories

My dad did die serving his country. He was on active duty getting trained on the weapons systems in the second seat of the F4 fighter jet.

He also died in the process of transitioning from the Air Force to the Air National Guard: the reserves of the air force. He wanted to take a step away from 80 hour work weeks, spend more time with his parents and sisters, and with us, doing woodworking, gunsmithing and hunting.

He also died fulfilling a dream he’d had since his teen years of being in the cockpit of a fighter jet. After seeing the Blue Angels at an air show, he turned to his friend and said “I’m going to fly one of those.” And though he wasn’t on the stick the day he died, he did fly one. Even though he wasn’t able to go to the Air Force Academy or take a direct route to piloting due to his need for glasses. When he died, he was actively making plans to build wood and canvas ultralight planes with his base commander. He was a maker and a first principles thinker who understood that direct experience is more reliable than authority.

Even after he transitioned to different dreams of Air Foce ROTC which made it possible to be the first to go to college in his family, he still was obsessed with the F4. He once stayed up all night programming punch cards to make the mainframes at University of Arkansas print out a huge image of the fighter plane made up of letters numbers and other ASCII characters.

Bigger stories

The two leading explanations for the crash are pilot error or mechanical failure resulting in a snap stall at high speed and low altitude. More people familiar with the crash believe it was pilot error. But others I’ve spoken to believe that the crash shares a lot of characteristics with a similar crash of the same model plane from the same lot produced on the same manufacturing line. That F4 had a mechanical failure causing amplification of pilot movement of the stick controlling the bellows that control how the tail moves to make the aircraft turn.

So he may also have died due to a mistake in quality control at McDonnel Douglass. Some have said that the quality control issues plaguing Boeing began after they acquired McDonnel Douglass. So his death may also mean that the captialist need for public companies to grow and grow and grow for their stakeholders inevitably mean that engineers get pressured to go faster and faster and people die as a result.

His service to our country also means that, before he ever climbed into the cockpit of an F4, he was the navigator for one of a relay race of large bombers that flew 24/7 on “nuke alert” for decades during the cold war. These planes and their crews flew in an endless triangle over the arctic circle ready to drop annihilation down on cities full of civilians. This a horror America invented and so far, the American military is the only one to ever unleash such a horror.

His death is, like all our lives, are caught up in the stories of power, war, economics that we are born into and each have to find a way to understand and choose how we will participate in and stand against.

My story

But lately, as my children grow into little adults, one photo captures what the loss of my father means for me. It shows him smiling with joy at the camera, shirt off, with my brother, Jason, and I riding him like a horse.

This photo is so sharp and still cuts me every time I see it. It shows me that I lost a father who loved me and could understand me with the knowledge that comes from being flesh and blood. And yet there are moments in my own life that become illuminated by this loss.

Presence illuminated by absence

On the way home from the dentist

One day, driving home from a hard visit to the dentist’s office with one of my daughters, I felt the weight of the emotional energy I had spent to support her through pain and advocate for her needs with the care team. And as I slumped forward in my seat, waiting at a stoplight, I thought, my father was never there to do this for me. And yet, I get to do this for my children. I reached back and squeezed my daughter’s foot dangling from her car-seat and reached back through time to touch the memory of myself straining to grow up into someone who didn’t need support.

The gift of parenting my children feels like a cosmic do-over to right the wrong of my missing father.

Savoring the beauty

A few weeks ago I was enjoying drinks and chatting with my neighbors on one of their back patios; a weekly happy hour tradition. The kids swing by the table and graze on whatever looks sweet or carby before running off to play together through the evening hours and into dusk. My 9 year old daughter, Hazel, interrupted our conversation to ask if I would push her on “the big girl swing.”

The “big girl swing” is a single strand of climbing rope looped over a high branch in an expansive canopy of an ancient California live oak in our neighborhood. It has a single circle of douglas fir wood for a seat, worn down by wave after wave of children using it. I made the swing when my oldest daughter was about this age. For Hazel, it had been a milestone as a toddler to graduate from a smaller, baby swing to this one.

I don’t always oblige, but this time I heard her reaching out to me with the desire for her father’s strength and attention; something forever out of reach to me, but something I can easily grant to her. I said “I’m enjoying this conversation, but because I care about you, I will take a break and come push you.”

As I stood in the dusk watching her spin and laugh with each successive push, rising up 20-30 feet into the air, pendulum swinging with joy, jokes and chatter rising up from the nearby neighbors, I felt something like what I think my father would have felt had he lived to see my brother and I this age. I felt some part of him in me, alive to this richness and joy.

In this moment, his loss illuminated this goodness, casting a shadow back through time to my own self. I remember learning to push myself on a swing like this, alone by pushing off the tree trunk with my legs. But I don’t remember feeling the power of a grown man pushing me and sharing in my joy and exhilaration. And yet, that night I was both — doubly alive and present to this moment.

Later that night, Hazel came back to the patio and sat by me, laying her body in a chair and her head in my lap. Leaning back, she noticed the bright fingernail moon shining between the eaves of the roofline. Then she said:

“Look at the moon, daddy. It’s so beautiful. We have to savor these moments of beauty in this world because we won’t have them forever.”

I lost my father. And yet what his death means is not simply a sacrifice in service of others, or a casualty of capitalism or the American war machine.

It is the defining tragedy of my life. And, at my best, I strive to live in spite of it and in contrast to it. I try to be the sort of man who pursues dreams other people think are impossible and who is simultaneously interruptible by his children to get down in the floor and play.

And sometimes, I feel his loss illuminating these moments of beauty with deeper meaning and sharpness. And, like Hazel reminded me, I try to savor them.

On October 6, 2024, my two brothers and I drove into the Ouachita National Forest. We were navigating to the best lead we’ve had in years on locating the place where my father died. 

Captain Richard Lumpkin was in the second seat of an F4 Phantom fighter jet when it crashed into the south Arkansas forest on June 5, 1985. That’s as much as I knew when I started searching for answers in my 20’s in college. My search for where he died ended this year after a series of breakthroughs led to some locals confirming the place where the plane went down.

Crash Site Visit

Day 1

We met up in Mount Ida and all piled into my little brother’s Tacoma which we were glad of when we hit our second portion of the road washed out by a dry stream.  About an hour later we pulled off into a clearing with a metal gate blocking the path down a grassy road.

We walked down the road through another clearing and into a food plot that had been plowed under.  A large forking oak stood on the eastern edge of the food plot.  We walked beyond it into the trees.

Within 5 minutes we started spotting pieces of the plane.  Small, hand sized pieces of forest green aluminum; the skin of the plane twisted and deformed.  Wiring harnesses embedded in the ground we pulled up like carrots. 

The first thing that struck me was the violence of the destruction. It was as though the plane had been put through a blender. I had always imagined that the plane had crashed and my dad and the pilot had burned. But it was clear that the plane had simply been annihilated; turned to confetti. We filled three shopping bags with debris before we stopped picking up pieces. There were too many to gather them all. 

My little brother had a special knack for seeing things my older brother and I missed. He kept pulling pieces from the ground I had stepped over without seeing. 

He found the end of a zipper attached to a piece of green nylon flight-suit.  At that moment I realized and said aloud, that we needed to be prepared to find human remains. I learned in 2022 that they only found 40 lbs of human remains between the two men who died there and that’s what we buried in the cemetery. This spot is where they were truly buried.

We walked the compass bearing 40 degrees off north from the first pieces we found.  We found a partially buried piece of one jet engine and another large piece eroding out of the ground.  Beyond the buried pieces we didn’t find any more debris.

We left most of the pieces near where we first found them.  Each of us selected some to take.

What they would have seen

I flew a drone capturing video along the trajectory they would have taken before hitting the trees.

Day 2: He would have loved this place

The next day I came back alone.  I drove another dirt road about a mile south looking for any clue of a road or offshoot from there to the second jet engine which eye witness accounts place about one mile southwest of the main crash site.  Then I drove back to the main site and stopped about a mile west and walked south to pick up the trajectory line again.  I walked that line back to the main crash site and found nothing.

On the second day in these woods, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the place.  My dad was an avid hunter who traveled all over the United States hunting big and small game.  I have a photo of him posing with a bear he killed. In the photo, my dad is dressed in camo with a camo bucket hat and two turkey feathers sticking out in front. 

I found a turkey feather near where we first found the pieces of the plane.  I put it on a rock near where I found the flight suit as a kind of gesture at a memorial.  This is where he died and where his body went into the ground.  He would have loved this place.

I returned to the main debris field and immediately started finding more.  Shortly after while walking back up toward the clearing, I found a piece of a boot.  The toe section, sheared off with the lining still inside.

What it means to me

It’s taken me months and I’m still unpacking what this all means for me.  But a few things feel different now:

1. He’s no longer missing 

One day he just disappeared from our lives and I knew it happened somewhere in the woods but now I know where.

2. I am heir to his life

I have felt from the beginning of this quest that I wanted to join the line of my life to the end of the line of his life. I had expected it to close the loop and bring something to an end.

What I did not expect is that by joining my line to his, I feel a new security and confidence in my identity as the son of Richard Lumpkin. And as a result I feel a new quiet power that flows from his supreme competence, curiosity, gregarious exploration and self-reliance. I’ve spent my adult life waking up to little bits and pieces of this. But now, somehow, after visiting this place, I feel the heir to it all. I am this kind of man because he was this kind of man. His way of being lives in me and is fully mine. And it wants to explore ever outward into new territory, new wilderness, new creativity, into fresh possibilities. And because of who he was, I am.

Thanks

I want to say thanks to a few people in particular who went above and beyond in helping us find the spot.

– Bill Womble who was one of the first on the scene and went over maps with us to help us confirm the general area.

– HC Varnadore who first took my family to visit the crash site on the one year anniversary and filled in a lot of details about the location. It was much easier to find back then and in the years since it got a lot harder to find.

– Josh Jackson who suggested I try OnX mapping software to identify who owned the land.  Turns out it’s federal land but that put me in touch with Dustin and ultimately Arkansashunting.net.

– Arkansashunting.net user AR1234 who found the historical aerial photo from 1986 that showed the shattered trees and road used in the investigation.  I was able to overlay this onto current maps indexed to the position of the road and get within 100 feet of the original ground scar to start our search.

– ArkansasHunting.net user DeputyDog (aka Seth Allen) who spent the better part of a week driving around the area talking to folks who were around when it happened and went out to visit the site ahead of us.

– Dustin Opine of Arkansas Game and Fish who responded to my cold email, remembered a local, Johnny Haga, who had pointed the spot out before and went out to confirm it. Their GPS pin led us straight to the debris field.

– Ryan Bolger who inspired me to keep pushing after he shared the story of his own search for his birth mother which had so much in common with my search.

– And of course, my two brothers, Jason Lumpkin and Andrew Wyers who joined me on this wild goose chase. Though Andrew’s father is my step-father, after the visit, he shared that he feels that so much of his life was set up by the foundation that Richard laid.

Like so many of us, I’ve been watching in horror since October 7th. I’ve felt paralyzed by not knowing what to do or say or how to understand how we got here.

It feels again like it felt after September 11th; the first time I felt myself clinging to the back of my country like some angry beast lumbering towards vengeance.

I’ve turned myself inside out imagining: hiding in a bedroom with with my kids while gunmen stalk us; calling to my daughters buried under rubble; watching my littlest one wither without access to insulin.

I’ve called and messaged my government representatives demanding they not support and pay for this because that is what the people the I know with friends and family in Gaza have asked us who have the power and privilege of being American to do.

After a month of talking with friends and family this is what I can say:

Making people into non-people

These weapons and these actions are inhuman. October 7th is a horrifying tragedy. And the people of Palestine are not animals and their ongoing slaughter is a travesty. The holocaust was possible because people convinced themselves the Jews weren’t human. The Isreali defense minister started this bombing campaign by saying “these people are human animals.”

We don’t have to know the solution to know it has to stop

We don’t have to have a foolproof plan to imagine a future other than this. In fact imagining another way forward is a prerequisite for finding another way. It doesn’t have to be this way.

The challenge to be present with others’ suffering and not be overwhelmed into inaction

When I worked as a hospital chaplain early in my career I was with people who were suffering and dying every day. And I was with doctors and nurses who cared for them. We all struggled to find the right balance of being present to the suffering all around us and not being so overwhelmed that we couldn’t do our jobs to serve those people suffering. There were times that being present to such intense suffering felt like holding my head underwater. I could only do it for so long before having to leave and come up for air.

Over time, the veteran chaplains and doctors and nurses who had learned how to show up day after day taught me that it does not do any one any good for me to try to take on other people’s suffering for them as though it were my own. It’s not possible, it’s not true and it doesn’t actually help. One nurse I worked with explained that holding this boundary is like having a callus on your foot: it has to be thin enough to feel when you are being hurt but not so thin you can’t keep walking.

I learned that what does help is paying attention to other people’s suffering, really paying attention, allowing ourselves to enter into it and know it and imagine ourselves in it and doing this in such a way that the people suffering feel seen and known in the truth of their pain. And then to step back into our own lives and positions of safety, stability, power and privilege and to take action on their behalf to help; the sort of action we can imagine we would want someone to do for or on behalf of us if it were us who were suffering this way.

Painting as a practice of paying attention

Painting for me is mostly about focusing my attention for an hour or so on one thing. It’s been hard to be present to the kind of suffering the people in Gaza are enduring without feeling it will overwhelm me. But this is one way I’ve been able to.

The Washington Post photo I was working from captured my attention with the dark monstrous thunderheads growing from air-strikes looming high above the fragmented buildings. The photo is from so far away we can’t see any people. That’s how the people running this war want it. As viewers we are far away. But the destruction is still overwhelming.

The explosions and smoke are eating the city and the people in it.

I’m ashamed that I can’t stay more present to this suffering and do more. But this is what I can do today to stay present and stay human without being so crippled by it that I can’t keep walking.

Yesterday my friend Katie DiSimone died.  

I met Katie in an unsolicited direct message.  She reached out to me after I had asked some questions in a facebook group she ran. I was trying to figure out which hacked automated insulin delivery software was most likely to save my family from drowning in the endless labor of diabetes.

“You all live in Pasadena? I’m through that way frequently to visit friends.  I’d be glad to help you guys find a pump and get you stared on looping. 👍”

A few weeks later Loop gave us our lives back.

We met Katie in person at a film screening featuring her friends in a documentary about diabetes alert dogs called Luke and Jedi.  She was open, curious and fell in love with our daughter, Hazel.  Her daughter has type 1 diabetes too and Katie had made it her personal mission to make sure that tech-saviness would not be a barrier to other families getting access to this life-restoring technology.  She wrote the docs and supported hundreds in getting up and running with this tool.

A few months later I hosted a meetup where she helped people get loop built in an office conference room while other type 1 kids had nerf wars in my office.

I think that’s where we had our first argument.  I was advocating for some more distribution of the load of support and documentation writing she had been doing.  She didn’t see anything wrong with the current system and wasn’t looking for critique. Like all my favorite people, Katie had a strong perspective and owned it.

We met again at the 2018 DiabetesMine conference where I was demoing some ideas I had been working on. I wanted to give something back to the DIY community that had given my family so much.  She played with Hazel in the lobby and I remember her giving Hazel her full attention carrying on a serious 3 year old conversation as we stayed out way too late with the other conference attendees —other Tidepoolers, diabetes-hackers and influencers: heroes to me.  She made me feel like I belonged there.  Like I had always belonged because we had all suffered in similar ways.

A few months later we were colleagues at Tidepool working on and arguing about what good instructions for Tidepool Loop would look like. Katie always showed up with her full self and her full perspective.  And that could mean her eyes beaming with love at your type 1 toddler or her eyebrows raised in full incredulity at how you could be so myopic as to say the thing you just said.

I watched her advocate for changes to the Loop software with the devs.  I watched her catch bugs others missed, prove they existed and gather data on their scope and how they could be fixed.  I watched her leave Tidepool to spend more time with her family, a choice that, in retrospect was exactly right. I watched her double down on supporting the community in the Looped Facebook group.  I watched her burn out and take a step back, then get drawn in again helping people. I watched her transform her life a half a dozen times before it ended.

And like so many others over this past year, I watched Katie walk into cancer, toward death with her bright, curious eyes open, writing the docs for us the whole time.  In her facebook posts she invited us past the silence that usually isolates us from the suffering of those we love.  She invited us into the sacred space of knowing her death was certain, the time of her death was uncertain to join her in asking: what should she do?

She kept working.  She took walks with her dog.  She took vacations. She went to swim meets.  She did chemo and radiation. She printed out her entire facebook history (and documented the best ways to do it and save money in the process). She gathered up the last crumbs of life left on her plate and savored them.  And she invited us along.

Katie showed me that a person can approach their death the same way they approached their life: eyes open, curious, feeling it fully and sharing it with vibrant intensity.

There’s a fantasy floating around that if we could just get enough free time, we could do anything.  If it weren’t for work or school or family or any of a dozen other time commitments we could write that novel, record that album or paint that devastatingly honest, surreal landscape that pulls back the curtains of reality to reveal the eternal light shining through all reality.  That fantasy is a lie.  You will never get that time.  So you have to start now, doing art when you’re already busy as hell.
This talk originally appeared as a part of Fuller Seminary’s “Week Four: TED-style Talks” event.  They’ll be posting more talks here in the coming weeks.

1. Do stuff you love to do: 

Because you love it and you would do it anyway.  Because that energy, creativity and passion is like a force of nature that you can harness to drive your work forward.

If you find yourself doing it even when no one is looking and no one is paying, then you’re doing it because you love it, because it gives you energy and life.  Even if you lose sleep, there is a net gain of energy for you and those around you.

2.  Budget time for work-ish stuff: 

Don’t spend more time and energy on things that don’t require or deserve it.

3. Use the scraps: 

Structure your best impulses to create into your life so the choice you want to make is the easiest choice to make.  Use the left-over scraps of time by keeping the things you need to work on your art at hand.  Don’t worry about how little time you have.  The scraps add up.

4. Keep the stuff you do for fun, fun: 

It’s easy to lose the fun and playfulness that drew you to your artistic work which is one reason why people stop doing it.  If you don’t feel like doing it, skip it.  But take note if there’s something structural keeping you away.  This might mean it’s important not to get paid for your art.

5. Learn to love sketches, not perfection: 

Embrace the imperfections in your sketches and the background noise in your recordings.  Get past the pretense of everything you do being “world-class” and recognize the humble value in every movement toward being able to say what you need to say when you have something worth saying.  Perfectionism is a mixture of pride and fear that can deprive the world of the exercise of your gifts.  A finished sketch is more real than a vision of a perfect work never started.

6.  Find people who are interested and use their interest to motivate your work: 

When people connect with your honest work they are connecting with a part of you.  It allows people who get it and appreciate you to be drawn in and those who don’t to move on.  This is a good thing! Obviously, the web makes this easier.   

7. Say yes to limitation:

Limitations, deadlines, constraints help you finish.  They may also stop you from creating polished masterpieces, but they can also help keep you from ruining work by over-working it.

8. Say yes to collaboration:

Collaborations open up new opportunities for formation of a generative community out of which new work, energy and ideas can emerge more quickly than working alone.  They are also opportunities for you to give and receive generosity.

9.  Integrate Integrate Integrate:

Don’t think of your artistic work as something that you have to add to your schedule but as something that is a part of who you are that you bring to everything you do and experience.  

I used to think of all the things I am interested in and love as threads that I would one day have to cut off in pursuit of truly important things.  And it’s true that commitments to school, family and work have to take priority.

But I’ve found that with a little intention and perspective, I can wind all the threads that make up who I am into one cohesive identity.  

The key is wind the rope.