They just didn’t see who I was, and it hurt me deeply. But one day I was sitting on a beach and it suddenly came to me: my soul had needed that struggle. It had needed to fight off my parents’ idea of who I should be. It had needed to do this to become strong.

The people he loved, he thought, were visitors, and waiting inside them was the possibility of someone better or someone worse, someone good or someone wretched, someone intimate or someone strange. His wife, son, friends, coworkers—he could not count on any of them to be consistently themselves.

To this day, my greatest fear in life is to never be able to truly understand his identity as a man—to fully grasp how much he sacrificed, how much he cared, how hard he tried—and how much we may share as adults. That I, perhaps, will understand we were both just two men who, at their core, were trying nothing more than to grasp the hard truth that