Can I Get a Hoya?
Can I Get a Hoya?
The story behind "Gordon Strong," a song for my nephew
On Sunday, August 16, 2026, members of my family floated the St. Croix at Danbury, Wisconsin. Tubes, coolers, sunburns, cousins yelling at each other across the water. They do this every summer now.
I reside in California and attended the funeral, but I've remained in California for all of the get-togethers, bike rides and mud runs. Seventeen hundred miles is a long way to be from a family that keeps gathering without you. At some point you quit apologizing for it and start looking for something you can send instead.
So I made a song.
The kid who rocked that floor
My nephew was Steven Richard Gordon, born October 28, 1999, raised in Sturgeon Lake, Minnesota, in a house run by my sister Tabitha.
Tabitha taught a line dancing group called the Show Stompers, so Steven grew up inside it. He played in the marching band at Willow River School. He worked at the Subway in town. His mother's own word for him is class clown.
Our cousin Danyel tells a story about a Moberg family reunion. Tabitha had set up music in the corner of the hall and a few people got up to dance, our sister Ruth among them. Then Steven got in behind them.
"He's doing everything they're doing, only adding like a bazillion other things. He rocked that floor. It was so cool to watch him. And that's my favorite memory."
Tabitha named him after our brother Steven. Her reasoning has never been improved on: she'd never met a Steven who was mean.
Defender
Steven enlisted in the Air Force, went through Security Forces training with the 343rd Training Squadron at Lackland in San Antonio, graduated in April 2019, and got stationed with the 341st Security Forces Squadron at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana. Security Forces call themselves Defenders. Their motto is "We lead by deed."
Our cousin Rachel enlisted around the same time. She talks about sitting in a recruiter's office at an ugly hour of the morning, dreading whoever was about to walk in and share the shuttle down to MEPS with her. The door opened and it was Steven. Neither of them had planned it. MEPS is two days of tests and standing around and getting moved from room to room, and by the end of it he had a dozen strangers sitting in a circle talking and laughing, with the guy supervising them telling everybody to shut up more than once. Rachel got to basic training a week ahead of him. Once she knew he'd arrived, she started scanning every flight that marched past for a redhead.
In Montana he became everybody's roommate and everybody's problem. Makenzi Garn, who calls herself his Montana mom, says the first thing anyone told her when she met him was to listen to his Minnesota accent and the way he said "bag." He helped her move into an apartment in October and moved into her house in November, before she'd finished settling in, because he was not a patient person about being included.
"Every minute you made sure I was doing okay at the most random times. My favorite thing I'll miss about you."
Hadley Lovell served with him on Delta Flight and wrote the line that ended up steering the whole song:
"You will always be a part of the Delta Flight family and will never be forgot. I fight for you now... Fly High Defender, it was an honor serving with you."
His friend Christian Churchwell said it plainer. Corny jokes, checked on you all day, heart of gold.
He had a puppy named Moose. He was fast at a Rubik's cube. He liked Buffalo Wild Wings and disc golf and buying things he'd want to replace six months later, and he kept about thirty dollars in loose change on the floor of his car that he'd trade to a younger sibling for cleaning it out.
The first weekend in June
Steven got promoted in the spring of 2020, and went tubing with friends in Montana to celebrate.
Later that weekend he got on a motorcycle he'd owned about two months. He went down on the highway between Cascade and Craig, near mile marker 242, and was hit by a car traveling behind him. The Highway Patrol found no indication that speed or alcohol were factors.
He was airlifted to Benefis Health System in Great Falls. Somebody told Tabitha that as they loaded him onto the plane, banged up and cracking jokes, he asked the crew, "Can I get a hoya?" She's always careful to add that she doesn't know whether that one's true.
The first reports sounded survivable. A broken femur, no spinal damage, no brain damage, nothing internal. The next day the hospital called and said it was critical.
The family drove fifteen hours. It was the first day Montana had reopened during COVID and they had to argue their way through a screening tent to get inside. Jamie, who's worked as a first responder, watched the monitors while everyone else watched Steven. Every time Tabitha spoke, his heart rate climbed. When my brother Tom leaned in and called him "my redheaded stepchild," the way he always had, it jumped from 120 to 158.
They played his music the whole time. Peppy rap, whatever he liked, right up to the end. He seemed to nudge his head at the familiar ones.
Tabitha sat with him alone and told him the truth about what had happened and what the doctors were saying. Then she gave him a choice, because she has always given her kids choices.
"And after I said that, I felt a presence saying, 'It's okay, Mom. I'll be okay.' And that's when I knew he left."
He came off the ventilator on June 2, 2020 at 9:58 p.m. and took his last breath on June 3 at 1:52 a.m. He was twenty.
His youngest brother was holding his hand. The two of them were never huggers. They mostly expressed affection by putting batteries in a sock and throwing it at each other, which is how the deer mount came off the wall one summer. He says the hand slowly got tighter.
What he left
Steven was an organ donor. Two men, ages 77 and 59, can see because of him. He gave skin to burn patients and bone to people he'll never meet.
His mother, who had every right to be furious at the world that week, stood up at his memorial and talked about the young woman who hit him, and hoped out loud that her life would amount to something. She also told the room a story from the back of his baby scrapbook about two traveling angels, which ends on the line she's been living on ever since: things aren't always what they seem.
Then she asked the room, "Can I get a hoya?"
HUA is Air Force shorthand for "Heard, Understood, Acknowledged," and it doubles as the noise you make when somebody on your team does something right. Tabitha pronounces it hoy-yaa. She has never once said it correctly, and nobody has ever corrected her.
The room said it back.
Trees, benches, and a Rubik's cube
Steven is under an apple tree in Tabitha's backyard with a stone bench beside it because he loved apples. Tom and Jamie planted a second apple tree out at the hunting property, on the theory that houses get sold and land stays in the family, so there'd always be one somewhere. The school has an engraved bench for him. A lot of people got tattoos.
My sister Ruth taught herself to solve a Rubik's cube because Steven was fast at one, then bought ten more and handed them out at the memorial under the hashtag #Rubiks4Steven. Her reasoning has stuck with me:
"Life is like a Rubik's cube. Life has many twists and turns and sometimes things just magically land in the right spot and that's exciting. And sometimes someone comes along and messes everything up and you feel like all hope is gone. You may think about cheating and peeling the stickers off and thinking it will be easier, but it may just make things worse. So we continue on twisting and turning."
His sister Samantha, who called him her person, named her daughter Stephanie and wrapped her in Steven's blue baby blanket. She dyes part of her hair red.
And the family keeps finding reasons to be in the same place. There's been a ten-mile bike ride in the rain near the school, a Rugged Maniac mud run with a team of them covered head to toe, and a motorcycle safety event in his honor. Now there's the river.
The tubing is deliberate. Different state, different water, nothing like the Montana afternoon he was celebrating a promotion on. They took the last ordinary good thing he was doing and made it the thing the family does every August.
Making the song
I haven't made it to the rides or the mud run or the river. So a few months ago I sat down with everything the family had already put into the world about him: Tabitha's account of that week, the funeral recording, posts from his sisters and cousins and the Defenders he served with, the news report, Ruth's cube, Makenzi's heart-shaped rocks from Holter Lake.
Then I made a list of what wasn't mine to change. Phrases that had to survive into the song intact, because they were already his and already the family's:
- "We lead by deed."
- "I got you."
- "I love you to the moon and back."
- "You may be gone from my sight, but never from my heart."
- "Fly High Defender"
- "If you can make someone smile or laugh, you have done your job for the day."
- "HUA," or the way his mother says it
- "Gordon Strong"
That last one was the title before there was a song. His friends in the Air Force called him Gordon. "Gordon Strong," is what the family started saying to each other afterward.
"I got you" is my brother Tom's. Steven would call and ask him to grab something from McDonald's on his way up, and Tom would say, "I got you," and eventually Tom just started showing up with the food unasked.
"If you can make someone smile, you've done your job for the day" is Tabitha's. She told it to him when he was living at home. He ran with it.
The song came out as a country rock ballad, which was never really in question given the line dancing. Acoustic and piano in the verses, pedal steel, and the band opening up on the chorus. His mother stroking his orange hair and playing his favorite songs is in the second verse. The apple tree is in the last chorus. The hoya is in every chorus, because it had to be.
The cover is Steven in his ABUs with wings behind him. Freckles and all, twenty years old, looking straight at the camera like he's about to say something that'll get him in trouble.
"Gordon Strong" is out now under GamesOver on Spotify, Apple Music, and everywhere else.
Steven Richard Gordon
October 28, 1999 - June 3, 2020
A1C, 341st Security Forces Squadron, Malmstrom AFB
Fly high, Defender.
Can I get a hoya?