Their relationship had always been strained. I’d assumed, my whole life, that Dad was simply disappointed in Eric — that my colorful, sensitive brother was a puzzle our stern father couldn’t love the way he loved his more conventional daughter. Eric assumed it too. He’d spent his adulthood at a careful distance from Dad, both of them polite, neither of them close, a lifetime of a son believing his father wished he’d been someone else.
The letter said the opposite. And it broke both of us open in that cemetery, in the best possible way.
“I spent your whole childhood trying to make you smaller,” Dad had written, “because the world I came from punished men who stood out, and I was terrified it would punish you. I thought I was protecting you. I was suffocating you. I made you wear gray because I was afraid of what red would cost you, and the cost of the gray was that you grew up thinking your father didn’t love the brightest thing about you. I loved it most, son. I was just too much of a coward, and too much a product of my time, to ever tell you.”
