This is an opinion column.

I knew my father had died. I was 11 years old, and he was in the hospital, had been for a long time. They didn’t tell us why. Not back then.

My younger brother and I were at “Aunt” Bobbie’s house. Mom was at the hospital. The phone rang. Aunt Bobbie answered and told us to get ready to go. I knew Dad had died but said nothing. (It was decades before I found a death certificate; it listed the cause as prostate cancer.)

Aunt Bobbie took us home. After entering, we were ushered past many somber grownups—including our mother, sitting at the dining room table—into a bedroom where Uncle Jimmy (one of Dad’s brothers) and Johnny West (a family friend we called “Uncle Johnny”) awaited.

They told us.

I don’t recall much of what else they said, but fully know what both men did from that day forward: They stepped into the gap. They helped fill a hole in the hearts of two young boys who’d just lost their father. Filled them with guidance and love.

They helped raise two young boys into men.

Uncle Jimmy died in 1985. Early this past Labor Day morning, Uncle Johnny rested, too. Rested after decades of standing in the gap—not just for me and my brother, but for so many more.

So many more he helped raise into adults.

He was 88 years old.

Uncle Johnny was an Army vet—two years of active duty, 31 years in active reserve. Up until his body began to weaken a few years ago, the man was about as fit as an any soldier younger.

He mostly won the myriad health battles confronted. He held onto that high-pitched laugh, razor-sharp memory, and that strength. Oh, and he stayed feisty. At home under hospice care in recent days, he was barely conscious, yet he’d yank his arm away when a nurse tried to take his blood pressure.

A couple of months ago, as his body further weakened, he said to Aunt Vee: “The plan is in place.”

She didn’t know what he meant, and he offered no further explanation. “The plan is in place,” is all he’d say.

The plan, of course, was to do this thing called life, and now death, as he always did—in his own way. Over the weekend, he was visited by a parade of family and friends, some of whom were in town for a divinely timed high school reunion. They spoke to him, shared laughs around him. Some sang to him.

They didn’t know if he heard them.

Aunt Vee once worked for my father at his store on Greenwood Ave, the heart of Black Wall Street. She babysat me as a toddler, helped teach me to read. “Your dad was so nervous because you were his first born,” she once told me. “He didn’t want me to let you play in the front yard. ‘Don’t let him go near the street,’ he’d say. Heck, I grew up in the country. You’d be alright as far as I was concerned.”

Aunt Vee stood in the gap, too, alongside her husband, for me and my brother, and so many more.

She still stands.

Last month, Uncle Johnny and Aunt Vee celebrated their 65th year of marriage.

“I sat with him and told him what a wonderful husband and provider he had been,” she told me on Sunday. “I said we’ve done things in life that we never imagined when we got married 65 years ago.

“I don’t know if he heard me.”

I assured her he did. The plan was in place.

I asked her to tell Uncle Johnny, I love him and to thank him for standing in the gap and lifting two young boys into men.

Oh, and ask him to say hello to Mom, Dad, and Uncle Jimmy.

More columns by Roy S. Johnson

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Do we want our children to go to school or prison? State funding levels provide an answer

Conquering from the outside, Sha’Carri Richardson is back in the fast lane for greatness

‘Skinny-shamed’ as a youth, Birmingham mom now a champion bodybuilder

Indian American, fired by Huntsville contractor after telephone call with dying relative, files lawsuit

I’m a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary, a member of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame, and winner of the Edward R. Murrow prize for podcasts for “Unjustifiable,” co-hosted with John Archibald. My column appears in AL.com, as well as the Lede. Check out my new podcast series “Panther: Blueprint for Black Power,” which I co-host with Eunice Elliott. Subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, The Barbershop, here. Reach me at [email protected], follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj