What do you do when your mind is short circuited with all the overwhelming and conflicting emotions a terminable diagnosis for a family member brings?

You play golf.

So, when Tim Powers got the phone call from his dad, Bill, last spring, telling him that Bill had a rare form of soft-tissue cancer, Tim knew exactly what he had to do.

Take a leave of absence from his job as the Wheeler girls basketball coach and spend as much time as he could at the Anderson Country Club, where his dad belongs, playing golf with him.

These were precious moments and Tim’s mind was awash with possibilities. Maybe they could head across the pond and do Ireland in the summer. They could play the Robert Trent Jones trail in Alabama in the Spring. Las Vegas and Florida were options, too.

But the cancer had plans of its own.

In July, Powers was in Prague supervising a trip of Lake Central kids for a school trip when he got another phone call. His dad was very sick.

A simple surgery to check the cancer inside his brain had turned into a 10-hour ordeal.

“Come home quick,” they told him.

He survived, but there were infections and problems with medication and unplanned time spent in a care facility and, well, more complications than a triple bogey on the first hole brings.

All those weekends — driving between Highland and Anderson to see his dad — has given Powers plenty of time to think about golf and his dad.

About how his dad always played by the rules. They never ever gave putts.

About how he’d arrive at the bank where he worked 90 minutes before it opened and stay until after it closed.

About how he retired from his job — and then took a job as an appraiser because he couldn’t stand to not work.

About how he learned the game while caddying at a country club in Terre Haute and decided one day, he was going to belong to a country club.

About how his dad followed Tim, who also is the golf coach at Lake Central and the kids around at the golf state finals when they had it — and then lost it — in the amount of time it takes a passing thunderstorm to hurdle through the course.

Tim and his kids were heartbroken when they went from first place to missing the cut in the span of nine holes.

“That’s golf,” his dad told him. “I’ve seen it before. You have to be happy that your guys weren’t afraid to compete.”

About how golf binds the two of them.

Bill Powers turned 70 last month. He is doing better.

On Sunday, he rode in a cart with his golf buddies and on Monday he did an appraisal even though his head was “killing him.”

The last time he and Tim played, one day before Bill went into the hospital for surgery, Bill beat him. Tim was so hot after he three-putted the last green that he tossed his ball in the parking lot.

He hopes to get out with him soon, before the weather turns cold and the trees are bare. Then, he won’t care who wins.