06/06/2026
Bates farm will be closed from 2pm - 7pm tomorrow while we celebrate Mary Lisa Bates father's life.
Jerry Lane Lansford- December 9, 1948 - May 27, 2026
The Fixture
Some men are heroes in the traditional sense — broad-shouldered, steady, the kind who show up exactly when and how you need them. My father was never that man. Still, he showed up anyway, in his own crooked, complicated way, and maybe that counts for something. Maybe it counts for everything.
He was brilliant in a way that defies explanation — no degrees, no formal training, just hands that understood mechanical things in ways that others couldn’t quite follow, yet always needed. Asperger’s before anyone in our world had a name for it. The ordinary rhythms of life — emotion, connection, the unspoken language between people — moved around him like water around a stone. He felt things. He just couldn’t translate them into anything anyone could use.
He married the wrong woman. Most gentle souls do, at least once. She was chaos dressed in perfume — manipulative, manic, consuming. He was Baptist-raised and divorce wasn’t a word that lived in his vocabulary. So he endured. And when enduring became unbearable, he found alcohol, because alcohol quieted the world’s noise and softened the edges, making the overstimulation of simply existing a little more manageable.
They divorced in 1983, Mom took everything she could reach.
───
He met Virginia somewhere in the wreckage of after. She was genuinely sweet — the kind of sweetness that isn’t performance, that doesn’t want anything back. Because of her, I landed on their doorstep at fifteen, angry and already half-gone in my heart, already planning my escape from every single person related to me by blood.
I was not parentable. I knew it then. I know it more clearly now.
The yard had six cars. One worked completely. The others were close — always almost fine, always needing one more thing. That was his life, really. Everything interesting, everything promising, always in need of one more thing.
I ran at sixteen. College. My ex. The future I’d already decided on without asking anyone’s permission.
At seventeen, I lost a baby.
Two weeks later, Virginia, his wife, died in a car wreck.
I watched my father begin to come apart at the seams. I was seventeen, in school, carrying my own grief like a stone in each pocket, and I spent eight months trying to hold him together through sheer will and proximity. Then I got pregnant myself, and you cannot chase a drowning man when you are learning how to breathe for two.
───
Life has a dark humor to it.
That next year, 1989, my father-in-law died. Dad had helped their family over the years — appliances, repairs, the practical language he spoke fluently. My oldest was born. And somewhere in the overlap of that grief and that new life, my mother-in-law Frankie and my father found each other.
Everyone hated it but me.
She was good for him in ways I couldn’t have engineered if I’d tried. She taught me something invaluable, not in lectures but in the quiet example of how she handled him — how to set a boundary without cruelty, how to meet someone exactly where they are instead of where you wish they were. He still drank. But he functioned. He moved through the world again the way I remembered from when I was small, before everything got so loud and broken.
───
In 1989, when I married my first husband, he bought us a 1974 trailer. It wasn’t much. It became everything.
That’s where my kids grew up — in a place he helped build back up, year by year, teaching me how to fix what was broken or rolling up his sleeves and fixing it himself. He stayed about four miles away with Frankie, my mother-in-law. Always close enough. Always a fixture, which was the most reliable thing about him, and I had learned by then that reliable and perfect are not the same word and never were.
When I was twenty-two, I paid — with his money, because he handed it over without being asked twice — to get custody of my fifteen-year-old sister. He knew he couldn’t parent her. I knew it too. But leaving her where she was wasn’t something either of us could stomach. So I took her, and he made it possible.
He never liked my ex. He tolerated him, which was its own kind of love.
───
When I finally left in 2004, he stayed with Frankie — my then mother-in-law — until her health made it impossible for him to manage alone. Then he moved in with me and the kids. A couple of years of that arrangement — an old man who couldn’t quite navigate normal life and a household that had never been quite normal either. We managed.
By 2008, I had found the love of my life. Christy found Dad a cheap house to rent nearby. He and my uncle moved in together after Dad had a hernia surgery and had developed heart condition and COPD in 2012. They were, I swear to God, the real-life Sanford and Son — two old men rattling around together, making do, driving each other crazy in the comfortable way that only happens between people who have run out of reasons to pretend.
It lasted until 2021.
Dad got sick. Came home on hospice to my house. We all held our breath.
He got better.
He lived five more years.
───
I have thought a lot about what to call him. Father feels too formal for what he was. Dad is accurate but incomplete. Fixture is the word that keeps coming back — the way certain things in a house are just always there, not decorative, not always functional in every way you need, but present. Constant. Load-bearing in ways you only understand when you imagine them gone.
He was a gentle soul who didn’t know how to cope and used the tools he had, even when those tools were wrong. He was a man the world wasn’t quite built for, doing his imperfect best inside a life that never stopped being complicated.
He was my father.
That’s the whole of it, and somehow, it’s enough.
Dad's celebration of life will be Sunday June 7th , 2026 at 5pm at Bates farm 343 Conway Road, Decatur, Alabama
Check out this Food & Drink Menu designed by Jessie Vandagriff.
