Living Legacy: What I Desperately Want My Sons to Know

My father died when I was 35, a child fully grown with a family of my own. He died quickly, but not so quickly that there were not opportunities for us to express ourselves at the end. Mutual terror tied our tongues and allowed moments during which we could have been honest and brave with one another to slip away; moments during which I murmured soothing and cowardly platitudes like, “Everything will be okay,” knowing full well that things were not going to be okay.

He was brilliant with wor...