I Was Furious When My Brother Showed Up to Dad’s Funeral in a Red Suit, but Dad’s Lawyer Knew Why
The Red Suit
A Story About What Fathers Leave Behind, and the Lengths They Go to Leave It Right
My father was a quiet man who said more than people thought he did.
Not in words — words were never his primary medium. He was a civil engineer by training and a problem-solver by disposition, and he approached communication the way he approached bridge design: what is the minimum necessary structure to carry the maximum necessary weight? He did not make speeches. He did not write long letters. He did not, as far as I knew, ever say I love you in the direct, unambiguous way that certain relationship books insist people need to hear.
What he did was show up.
He showed up to every school play I was in, including the ones where I was background scenery and had no lines. He showed up to Eric’s baseball games in the rain, in years when Eric’s team lost more than they won. He showed up, after our mother left when I was eleven and Eric was eight, without anyone asking him to or telling him he had to, and he rearranged his entire professional life around the simple fact that his children needed a present parent and he was going to be that.
He showed up.
For thirty-two years of my life, that was the defining fact about my father.
He was there.
And then he was not.
The pancreatic cancer was diagnosed in March and by September it had done what pancreatic cancer does, which is move faster than anyone is ready for, and we had six months of showing up in reverse — of being there for him the way he had always been there for us, driving him to treatment and sitting with him through the hard nights and learning, in those months, what it actually looks like when someone runs out of time.
My father died on a Tuesday morning in October.
He was sixty-eight years old.
He left behind a house that smelled like his coffee and his particular brand of aftershave, two children who were more shaped by him than we had understood while he was alive, and, as it turned out, a secret.
The secret was wearing a bright red suit at his funeral.
I need to tell you about Eric.
Eric is four years younger than me and forty percent more likely to do the wrong thing for the right reason. He is the kind of brother who shows up late to everything but shows up, who says the thing you’re not supposed to say because he has never learned to calculate social cost before speaking, who drives four hours in a snowstorm because you mentioned on the phone that you’re having a rough week.
He is also the kind of brother who did not learn, for most of our adult lives, how to be in the same room as our father without both of them ending up angry.
I am not going to tell you that my father and Eric had a difficult relationship and leave it there as though it were an immovable fact, because the truth is more complicated and more interesting than that. They were the same person. That was the problem. Two men with the same stubbornness and the same standard of what constituted acceptable behavior and the same conviction that they were right, occupying the same family for thirty-something years. 