My brother wore a bright red suit to our father’s funeral, and I was furious.
I thought he was being disrespectful.
He was being brave—
exactly as brave as our dying father had prayed he’d become.
Because sewn into the lining of that impossible red suit
was the letter our father spent sixty years too scared to write,
and a fund he’d been quietly building for thirty,
for the art school he’d forbidden,
with a note that said: don’t be gray like me; be bright like you.
He spent Eric’s childhood dimming him.
