When my father was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, I flew with my family to Houston for his treatment. The company he had spent his life building from a start-up into a national powerhouse offered us unlimited use of one of their eight corporate jets. As we soared smoothly over the Mississippi River in the sleek Lear, memories flooded back to me of the first time I flew with my father.

I was eight then, and my father was scheduled to fly to Tuscaloosa on an old single-engine Cessna on business. When he asked if I wanted to come along, I was ecstatic. I had never been on a plane before and spent the next few days frantically packing my school satchel with candy, toys, books, and games. I couldn’t believe I was going to fly on an airplane with my father! Every moment felt like a cause for celebration.

Finally, the day arrived, and as we waited on the tarmac next to the wondrous machine, the pilot asked if we were ready to board. I squealed, “Yes, SIR!” I was bouncing on my heels with excitement, effusive to the point of embarrassing my stoic father. His scowl told me I had broken a family rule by drawing attention to my unbridled emotions. I shut down. Over time, I learned the lesson too well. I became forever vigilant, interrogating hope until it confessed to being foolish, just like my father.

Nearly half a century after that first flight, my family and I flew together again, this time in the luxurious cabin of a corporate jet with plush couches and mahogany tables. My father sat mutely, staring blankly out the window, surrounded by his family. No one spoke. Our shared depression was as thick as molasses. Yet, I couldn’t help but remember our first flight on that tiny, ear-splitting, bone-rattling, single-prop puddle jumper.

Time was running out for my father—for us—and I ached with the loss of a past that never was. Perhaps, I thought, it should have been a picnic after all.

Over the years, I’ve tried to comfort myself by remembering that my father’s damaged upbringing made it hard for him to express or accept love. He was born dirt poor to a mother who hated her abusive husband. She planned to take her six-month-old baby and run away, but before she could, she discovered she was pregnant again, sought a remedy from her mother, and died of a botched abortion. That was my father’s introduction to love. I told myself that his coldness wasn’t personal. Anyway, he had suffered much worse than I had.

Chemo kept my dad alive for two years, but his cancer returned without mercy or respite. So, when he began hospice care at home, I flew from Minnesota down to Mississippi to be with my parents. Selfishly, I hoped my dad would have one of those transcendent death experiences people constantly share, a magical time of reconciliation, healing, and grace.

But as I learned, people don’t die for you; they die for themselves and in their way. So, my father was going out the way he had lived, both furious and terrified at what he could not control.

Dad and I were locked in a nonstop power struggle during his last weeks. He micromanaged every movement of the caregivers. The first two quit out of frustration. Finally, I had to step in and insist that “the next one is the last you get.”

He continued to bark out assignments like he was still the chairman of the board. From his bedroom, he yelled for Mom or me to come into his “office,” where he would declare his latest orders. Sometimes he forgot why he had summoned us and blamed us for not coming sooner. Once he awoke from a morphine-induced sleep to demand that I immediately change the oil in Mom’s car or tighten the screws in the chair at her makeup table, or make sure I checked the water dish for his beloved dog, Buddy, the only entity in the world he could comfortably show affection to.

Desperate for a solution to the constant running, I had a brilliant idea. So, I went to Best Buy and got a set of hand-held, two-way radios, so we wouldn’t have to race to the back of the house to see what he wanted.

However, in his state, my father couldn’t remember which buttons to hold for talking and receiving. Finally, he got so agitated that he yelled angrily for me to see why this “piece of junk” I had spent good money on wouldn’t work.

That’s when I lost it. All my stored-up resentment boiled over. “Goddamnit, Dad!” I yelled. “You’re dying! Is this the way you want to go? Pissing everybody off on your way out?”

My father said nothing. He lay the radio aside and turned his face to the wall. I will regret that moment for as long as I live. I hated to admit it, but after all these years, I still wanted to wound my father for the lifetime of distance between us. Regrettably, I had achieved my mission.

Emotionally exhausted, I sat by his bed, watching him, listening to his shallow breaths.

As he slept, I recalled the first time I wanted to hurt him. I was around five, and for Christmas, my father gave me a set of walkie-talkies that transmitted our voices through wires that snaked from my bedroom to the shabby little room where my father watched TV.

I don’t remember why, but I went to bed angry at my father one evening. Probably because he disciplined me for something I felt I didn’t deserve, a recurring theme in our relationship. So, I refused to kiss him good night and didn’t answer when he called me repeatedly from his end of the wires. But I couldn’t sleep, thinking of how badly I had hurt him. Finally, I relented and called his name on the little gadget. It was too late. My parents had gone to bed.

I felt the guilt again a lifetime later, perhaps even more sharply. Our relationship was filled with an abundance of blame and resentment, but so little love had been expressed between us.

As a novelist, I try to avoid symbolism that feels too easy, too contrived. But sometimes, the truth is not a subtle writer. My father and I spent most of our lives missing each other’s calls. Despite our good intentions, nothing seemed to work. We tried everything, from forced hugs to elaborate birthday and Father’s Day cards to dragging him to Minnesota for joint therapy sessions with my addiction counselor. When I confided in others about our strained relationship, I was met with the same platitude: “He loved you. He just didn’t know how to show it.” Intellectually I believed that, but it was little comfort. I was sure about how a father should show love to his son. Anything short of emotional effusiveness didn’t count.

However, I realized that I, too, struggled with showing affection after a certain age. I had grown just as uncomfortable with intimacy as my father, and when I sensed him on the verge of reaching out, I recoiled. It was all too unfamiliar and overwhelming. It was emasculating. Resentment was easier.

As his health rapidly declined, my father called me into his room during one of his last lucid moments. I hoped for the magic moment of reconciliation I had been waiting for, but what he had to say was far from it. “Johnny,” he said in a businesslike tone, “you need to look after your mother now. Make sure you get new tires put on her car. She won’t do things like that for herself.”

I promised to take care of my mother and asked if there was anything else he wanted to say. His voice was raspy when he spoke again, “Yes. I want you to know that after all our fights and bad things you said about me in front of that Yankee therapist, I never once took you out of the will.”

His words stung, and I winced. I never doubted that my father, the honorable businessman, would divide his assets equally between my brothers and me, and I was disappointed that he believed I thought otherwise.

He died without uttering the words I so desperately wanted to hear, and I wasn’t even sure what those words were. If I did, perhaps I could have said them to him.

At his funeral, mourners packed the church. My younger brother spoke in my place, even though I was the eldest son. The strained relationship between my father and me was no secret; most people were on his side. They saw me as the spoiled, liberal drunk who had turned his back on the family and fled North, the ungrateful prodigal son. They probably thought I killed him. Very few knew I was gay, or that my future husband sat beside me. I remained silent; the less I said, the better.

As I sat through my father’s funeral, listening to the two preachers from his past churches deliver their eulogies, I grew increasingly uncomfortable. Then angry. I couldn’t help feeling like they didn’t know him. Sure, they spoke of his dedication to family, job, and church, but it was all boilerplate stuff at Southern funerals. My father was so much more than that.

Unlike the pastors and many others in that church, my father didn’t simply conform to the dogmas and prejudices surrounding him. He was a man who came to his conclusions and opinions only after careful examination. And though I often disagreed with him, I knew his beliefs were well-reasoned and unshakeable. He was not a conformist sheep.

But as the preachers wrapped him neatly in a generic Southern Baptist bow, I felt a surprising surge of defensiveness for my father. This was all wrong! But how do you save a man from his own eulogy? Yet, I couldn’t let it go. If I did, I would regret it forever.

My father needed me now.

So, before the terror could overtake me, I shot to my feet and marched up to the pulpit. My family gasped, sure I was up to no good. People shifted uneasily in their pews, probably thinking I was there to cause trouble. And maybe I was because I did not know what I was about to say.

When I gripped the pulpit with both hands, my righteous anger commandeered my tongue, and I was no longer afraid. Instead, I felt my father beside me: his moral strength and obstinate certainty.

“I don’t know what all you’ve heard about my father and me,” I began.

“It’s true, I’ve fought with him most of my life. I resented him right until the day he died. But, because he never left the fight, never gave up on me as his son, I also knew him better than most.” I said that they should also know who he was before they buried him. Then I began sharing memories about Dad that I had once dismissed but now were at the forefront of my mind.

The first took place during the Vietnam War. Dad summoned his three draft-aged sons into the living room, where he proudly displayed a miniature billboard on the mantle that read, “Keep America Beautiful. Get a Haircut!”

“Boys,” he began. “I love my country. I fought in WWII and would have gladly given my life for America.”

God, I thought, he’s going to tell us not to wait to be drafted but to volunteer.

“But this war over there in Vietnam,” he said, “I don’t understand it. I don’t know what it’s for. I don’t know why kids are dying. So, if you want to fight, I will be proud of you. But if you don’t, I will help you get to Canada. No questions asked.”

I saw scowling faces across the sanctuary. This was a room packed with professed patriots and that meant reflexively supporting all wars, regardless of the rationale, and bitterly condemning those who dodged service.

Then I upped the ante and told them about the day I finally asked my conservative Christian father if he thought I was going to hell for being gay. The two fuming preachers behind me taught that homosexuality was an abomination and that gays are dammed to hellfire. Sunday after Sunday, Dad had heard them scream it from the pulpit.

“Johnny,” he said, “I believe every word in the Bible is God’s literal truth, and the way I read it, it says homosexuality is wrong.” But then he continued. “And I know my son. I know for a fact that he is not evil. He’s a good man.” He nodded once and then said decisively, “I guess both are going to have to be true.”

I told the congregation and the preachers that my father worshipped a god bigger than the inflexible fundamentalist dictates of the church. A mysterious god of paradox, contradiction, and inclusion. A merciful god who didn’t force him to choose between his faith and his son. My father’s words had made me, an avowed agnostic, question my absolute disbelief in a forgiving god.

The congregation sat in stony silence. But like my father, at that moment, I didn’t care what people thought. I hadn’t said those words because they needed to hear them. I said them because I needed to hear them. I said them because my father must have always wanted to hear them.

Before the funeral, I had dismissed memories of my father’s good parenting as maverick acts that didn’t fit with the travesties I had meticulously logged. In my estimation, the sum of the man’s actions painted him as a cold, rigid tyrant, incapable of intimacy and, therefore, of love. I was highly invested in that image, using it to excuse the disappointments in my own life.

However, with his passing and my shield of resentment laid down, those forgotten stories shone a bright light on the essence of my father’s love. He had chosen an infuriating consistency of principle to show his devotion, for whatever reason. He had never had such a role model in his chaotic, violent, and alcohol-damaged childhood. I never thought to ask him how he had fashioned himself into such an upright person with no examples. Or what drove him to reject his upbringing and become a successful and much-admired man. Was he atoning for the sins of his father, determined that his sons would never experience his kind of childhood hell? What could that be except for a ferocious, relentless strand of love?

No, his love didn’t look like what I craved, even demanded of him. But it was the love I was given, perhaps even the love I needed. Mirroring his business ethic, this kind of love was economical, sturdy, and an excellent investment for the future—my future. Like Mom’s car, it had reliable tires that would keep me safe in a dangerous world. It was up to me whether to accept it, to make it be “enough.” Today, it was.

Exhausted, I sat, and Jim, my newly outed partner, put his arm around me for all to see. My mother reached over and touched my hand.

“Thank you,” she said, purposely loud enough for others to overhear. “He would be proud of you.”

I collapsed into Jim, not caring who saw me weep. I ached in a thousand places where invisible, yet indissoluble bonds had connected us all along.

Finally, I could grieve my father.

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