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
