Dear Dad,

You were in my dream again last night. We were in a room together, talking about Galen, why he was always so distant. Galen was another one of those subjects we rarely touched on. I’d always ask you he was and you’d always say he was fine, nothing more. You know, I haven’t spoken to him in almost two years now. It weighs on me sometimes, especially when I think about how close he and I were becoming toward the end. I felt like you had your boys together, on the same page, and it made me happy to think we had been able to give you that. The summer before all of the craziness kicked in was the closest Galen and I will probably ever be. He was 17 and I was 28. We were both at the height of our respective powers. He was in the weight room all that summer and I remember a certain pride in your voice when you sometimes mentioned his new biceps on the phone. When the two of you showed up in New York later that summer for what was becoming your annual trip east, the kid I saw step out of the car and who embraced me warmly was no longer just my little brother. He was growing into manhood. The shift was a sudden almost intimidating one. Just one summer before I recalled a gangly, nerdy kid who wore glasses and played video games and had a strange obsession with swords. Now, a year later, I was being bear hugged by a man-child with bi-ceps and shoulders bigger than my own. If there was ever a momen that presaged my own decline it was then and there standing in the July heat hugging a little brother who wasn’t so little anymore.

I felt like I had a new best friend, except he wasn’t just some kid, he was my blood. I had waited for this moment for 17 years, the moment when I could take him into confidence and begin to play the role of the big brother. Now we had something in common: weights. I took him to the gym that day. I was anxious to see if his muscles were real, anxious too to show him that big bro still kept his stuff sharp. He had his do-rag on, his baggy jeans shorts and his ubiquitous wife-beater. It wasn’t hard to tell that he was proud of his new muscles. In a way I was the one who felt like the visitor. He carried himself with such confidence, like your son. Part of me envied the fact that he was growing into his manhood with you as his guide. I hadn’t been so fortunate. By 17 you’d been gone half my life already.

That first night in town I took him to Manhattan, to a party. We went to the Village and the whole time were driving I didn’t stop talking about the virtues of life in the city. It was my pitch to him. I wanted him to consider coming back east for college. I wanted him to be near me so that I could play the role of big brother on a full time basis. It’s what I always wanted: someone to look up to me. I remember the time when you and I were in the bathroom so many years ago. You were beneath the sink fixing the pipe that seemed to leak whenever the water was turned on and I asked you if I could have a little brother. Candace and Leslie had each other so I thought it was only fair if I had someone too. I wasn’t lonely because I never had a shortage of friends. I just always envisioned the bond between brothers. (Also, I was the only Ross male left and I wanted someone else to help relieve the pressure of having to carry on the name.)You and mom were still together then. I must’ve 7 or 8 at the time. We hadn’t yet moved to the house that was supposed to save the marriage. It’s hard to believe that just three years later you were remarried.

The day Galen was born you came to get me so I could see him in the hospital. I was in the backyard with G.G. and Sean and Ahmed playing basketball, as usual, when I heard the roar of the diesel engine in the driveway. The whole experience was so clear to me even at 11. I had learned the lesson of a lifetime: be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. I had asked for a little brother. I hadn’t thought about how that was going to take place.

The next night I took Galen out again. You went to bed early. You were tired and as usual perfectly content to stay in with a book you had bought at the Strand that day. I took Galen by a friend’s house first. There, he and I smoked marijuana together for the first time. I tell you this because in the months following your diagnosis the family often reported on Galen’s comings and goings, and on more than occasion one of your sisters or daughters (whoever was with you in California at the time) spoke of smelling ‘reefer’ coming from his bedroom. When I was there in December he even offered me some (I turned it down, of course!). I don’t know if it was his first time, the time with me, and it may have been irresponsible on my part, but I did it because I had always wanted to be the one who introduced him to things. The distance and the age had deprived me of so much that was rightfully mine as a big brother and I wanted to make up for all of the lost time in a weekend. I always wondered if you knew when I was high when I called you late at night. You never mentioned it. I do know that you and mom tried more than pot together. She’s the one who told those illicit secrets that seemed, I don’t know, outside of our relationship. We shared our innermost thoughts on the nature of existence, not our drug preferences. There were some things you never shared with me growing up that I now wish you had. For instance, I would’ve liked it if we had shared a beer once or twice just so I could know the feeling of adulthood in your eyes. That wasn’t your way, though.

After we smoked we went out to a club. I got Galen in even though he was only 17 by telling the bouncer that I would personally make sure he didn’t drink. There was a hip-hop group performing that night and I wanted to impress him. Once we were in I spent much of the night watching him from the bar. He stayed on the dance floor, close to the stage, and he danced by himself. He was into popping and locking and crip-walking, all that Cali shit. I enjoyed it, though. I recalled a self-conscience kid who struggled to fit in. I had been concerned that he would remain awkward and introverted and that he would stay at home with you longer than was healthy. I stopped worrying so much that night.
Later, we ran home in the rain. It was one of this hectic summer showers that hit hard then move on. I don’t know that I had been caught in a torrential downpour before or after where I’ve had so much fun or gotten so wet. Galen and I sprinted all the way home. It was brother against brother, just not so competitive. We both wanted out of the rain. I remember us running neck and neck the whole way and thinking, ‘This is the greatest night of our relationship.’ We had bonded and somehow all those buckets of rain had solidified it.

The next time I saw Galen was at Candace’s wedding two weeks later in Las Vegas. Little did we know that her wedding would be the culmination of your last trip east. You picked me up at the airport, then we went to our hotel. By then Galen and I were firmly attached. We talked easily the whole ride in from the airport and after we checked in he and I went shopping for outfits to wear to the wedding. Suddenly, I no longer felt the pressure to impress him, and perhaps he felt the same way. We were both your boys. I was proud to be a part of our triumvirate. The wedding came and went and then, a day later, I walked you two to a taxi and said my goodbyes. It’s hard to believe that that was the last time I saw you, well, as you.

The hardest conversation you and I ever had took place six or seven months later. It wasn’t long after the surgery to remove your tumor. We were at Leslie’s, sitting on the couch. We were trying to sort out your affairs without acknowledging the sole purpose for which one’s affairs are sorted out. At that time none of us was willing to concede. There were still too many avenues to explore and you were fighting so valiantly that the doctors considered your state something of a miracle.

During that time you were constantly asking about Galen. It was quite understandable seeing as it was the first time the two of you had been separated for that long a period (roughly two months). By then my sisters and practically everyone else in the family had given up on him. We had invited him to Washington several times and his only response was to ask us to send him more money. He’d run up a $500 phone bill by that point, the power bill was outrageous, and others were coming due everyday. I was paying your bills at the time so I saw everything and I heard most things. The times you did talk to him he only asked two things: when you were coming back and when you were sending him more money. He was under the impression that my sisters, aunts, uncle and I had conspired to kidnap you from him and his mother. He did not understand, or he was not willing to see, that his mother was incapable of caring for you or that the doctors in Maryland were far more capable than the doctors we had met with in Sacramento. Upon further consideration, I don’t even think his mother or anyone, myself included, had fully disclosed the severity of your disease to him.

As always, your cool temperament prevailed. Even in your clouded state you sympathized with the frustrations of a boy losing his father abruptly and without a full explanation as to the cause. What I didn’t always agree with was your need to continue playing the role of the dutiful and invincible father. ‘I’m fine. I’ll be alright. Don’t worry about me, focus on finishing school. How is the college thing working out? Are you eating?’ Over and over you would stumble your way through the performance you had so ardently perfected over the 36 years of fatherhood. Once when Galen mocked the speech impediment that frequently caused you to misuse or stumble over the simplest words (much to your understandable dismay) I had to leave the room in order to cool off.

That night at Leslie’s, however, you finally let down your guard long enough to ask where you had gone wrong. Why was he treating you with such disdain? Though you would never say as much, I knew what you were really asking was how, after all you’d done for him, he could treat you this way. It simply defied all manner of sense that he should be acting in this way toward you. Had you not been there each and every day after school to pick him up? Did you not drive sometimes as far as San Francisco (and wait for him I might add) so that he could attend parties? Had you not enrolled him in one of the finest schools in the Sacramento, given him more clothes and toys and gadgets than he could use in a lifetime? Had you not allowed him the freedom to explore and discover himself?

The girls, my sisters that is, chalked it up to the mother, your second wife. She was yet another pink elephant that we in the family rarely, if ever, discussed. The fact that she took such tremendous advantage of your generosity angered my sisters, and yours, to no end. We all wished that you would have put your foot down with her, demanded that she take her share of responsibility in raising her son, but, again, that wasn’t your way. Your way was always to come up with a solution that made everybody happy. Except you. Anyway, the girls agreed that your wife was in Galen’s ear, pushing him to ask for more money and telling him all sorts of nonsense about the family. I remember one conversation in particular when he demanded to speak with you. When he did get you on the phone he proceeded to berate you for not standing up for yourself against us. Angry as I was, I knew then that the poor boy had no idea the state our father was in. I want to believe that he was panicking and that since he was 3000 miles away all that he could do was lash out.

Dad, the only mistake you made with Galen was that you allowed him to be isolated from the family. Toward the end you realized as much, which is why you brought him back three summers in a row, but by then the damage had been done. He clearly saw himself as an outsider, perhaps even a screw up. At the family fish fries at your sister’s house in Richmond he would sit alone and he rarely spoke to his cousins. He hardly hugged anyone and when people tried to engage him he only offered curt, clipped answers in response. When he was in Washington, he seemed more interested in spending time with his other sister, Sandy, rather than with us and you never addressed that issue. It troubled you, I know because I recall a couple of times when you were concerned as to why he didn’t call for a couple of days in a row, but you never once said anything to any of us.

Leslie once told me about the time she took Joseph out to California to see you and Galen. Joseph looked up to Galen so much at the time, but Galen, from what Leslie tells me at least, treated him harshly and with indifference. She even recalls a time when your wife called Galen into the bedroom to watch movies with her and left Joseph standing at the door. It breaks my heart to even think of that little boy standing by the door wondering and waiting for it to open. Leslie was crushed by this and by the fact that you did nothing. You allowed the same thing to happen when I used to visit you for the weekend as a kid. I’d be in the upstairs bedroom watching T.V. by myself and maybe I’d get hungry so I’d walk downstairs to the kitchen. On the way I’d pass your bedroom and through a crack in the door I could see you and your wife and Galen watching television as a family. At the time I sincerely didn’t mind and I still don’t, but what you did not do was make us a family. You did not bring us all together and to a certain extent Galen’s treatment of you at the end is the outcome of that silences you kept.

That silence pervades so much of our lives. That was your way, I understand. You wanted us to make choices on our own, but there were times when I know I wished you had given me more resistance. That might’ve been made the difference, then again I might not have become what I have become. One never knows for sure; one can only do the best one can with the limited information one has at one’s disposal. Please do not think I begrudge you in any way. I love you dearly, that is why I am trying to be honest with you.

I agree with my sisters. What really separated Galen from the rest of us, and particularly me, was our respective mothers. You could afford to practice your brand of stoicism with me because my mother was the complete opposite. She could never control her emotions, although I must say she’s improved dramatically in recent years. I learned to love through her. I saw firsthand the pain of her experiences with men and with us. I saw her vulnerability, but also her compassion for others, particularly my friends whom she treated as her own. There’s so much that I admire about her now that I am older and somewhat wiser. But your second wife never learned how to love, what it meant to sacrifice completely and entirely for others, so she could never teach these lessons to your son. She was an emotional person, but she tended to manipulate with her emotions. I never told you this, but I always dreaded spending time with her because she wanted to act as though she was my friend when it was so obvious to me that all that she wanted was another person to control. Candace and Leslie really couldn’t stand the woman. It took me a little bit longer to understand how she had managed to form a wedge between you and everyone who loved you. Even the move to California was a way to separate you from your family, and you allowed it, in some sense even wanted it. I can’t blame you. The pressures you were under were tremendous. You were a small businessman in a corrupt city overrun with drugs and violence and you were being depended upon to provide for two whole families. How you did it as long as you did I’ll never know.

I’m not saying what I want to say. Galen was cold. He was proud. He was angry that these women came into his home after your diagnosis and told him what to do. He was pissed off that these women were openly disdainful of his mother. And he was angry that you left him for us. In the end, dad, that’s what he felt. In our last conversation, 19 months ago now, he said that I had had you for 28 years and Candace 31 and Leslie 36; meanwhile he’d only had you for 17. I admit that I lost it. I couldn’t believe that he’d kept score or that he didn’t understand that you had not been a part of my daily life since that summer day 21 years ago that I watched you pull out of the driveway for good. Yes, I saw you, but we didn’t live under the same roof. There were so many nights that I just wanted you to come home so that we could watch a game together or shoot around in the backyard or work on the Cougar. There were so many nights I went to bed in tears and there was nothing my mother could do to make things better for me.

But that was also the moment I realized how much Galen loved you, dad. He wouldn’t say it and he sure as hell didn’t know how to show it, but he felt it and it was probably so overwhelming that he could only express himself through his rage.

We were always in competition for you attention, dad. There was nothing more important to any of us than our time together with you. I wouldn’t miss our weekends together for anything in the world. It didn’t even matter that we often didn’t do anything besides sit around the house. I just wanted to know you were within reach, that’s all. I don’t know if you were really aware how much everyone loved you. It seemed to surprise you and even embarrass you to a certain extent that everyone rallied around you so quickly and so tightly. There were even times when I would come home on the weekends to see you and you’d say to me, ‘Why are you here? You have your own life to live.’ It just didn’t register that you were an enormous part of that life. In fact, the reason there was so much fighting in the first place is all because of how strongly we all felt about you. You were rare and you were radiant and it was obvious to anyone that came into contact with you that you were a consummate gentleman. We all just wanted to pay you back for what you’d given us unconditionally and without the slightest fuss. You were like a sage. You helped without asking for favors in return, you complied without questioning the nature of our needs. I think Galen was in shock, as we all were. You’d been the rock for everyone else. He always presumed you’d bounce back. I even think his matter of fact attitude was his way of doing as you taught him: staying cool.

Aunt Sissy told me that in the last few weeks when you had deteriorated to the point where you couldn’t get out of bed on your own, that you used to ask where your "men" were. Sissy was amused by this soldierly talk. You were looking for me and for Galen, but by then he and I hadn’t spoken in months. Even when I showed up on my own I could see the disappointment in your eyes. You were looking for Galen to be my side. You just wanted to see us once more together so that you’d know everything was alright. Before that it had never dawned on me that you might’ve been proud to be our father. At the very end, though, you would look at me with wonder. I think it was then that you really had the clearest vision of who I had worked to become all of these years. Sometimes, you’d touch my shoulders and grip my arms and then slowly you’d nod approvingly as if to say, ‘Yes, you are certainly a man now.’ Admittedly, I was a little proud of the way I had handled myself in the eye of the storm. I’d been there for you. Through nights I could hardly keep myself awake, nights when even coffee and cigarettes couldn’t revive me, I’d driven from New York to Richmond to see you every other weekend for two straight months. I’d proven to you, finally, that I was worthy. Secretly, I was even a little pleased that Galen had failed you because it made my love appear even more genuine. For that I apologize. I do indeed wish that you could have seen Galen before you passed on.

In the last conversation that I had with Galen he said that he didn’t like me. He said it over and over again. He pronounced each syllable so as to drive a dagger deeper and deeper into my heart. Perhaps he felt betrayed by me in particular because I was a part of the sacred trinity as well. Or maybe he just wanted to hurt me. There hasn’t been a day that I haven’t heard him reciting his hateful lines as if they were scripted. I wonder about him a lot. I wonder what he’s doing, if he’s in college. I have no way of getting in touch with him and honestly I’m not ready. At the same time I still hope that I can be there for him when he needs me someday. I know that a day will come when he seeks me out and asks about the last eleven months. Hopefully, he won’t have done something so drastic that he won’t be able to recover. I fear he has some years of anguish yet to come. There’s so much he missed, so much he could’ve been a part of, so much he’ll never have the chance to experience again. I haven’t given up on him dad. All the way to the end you hoped he’d walk through that door. You held on for it, I know. And it’s alright because I know your love for him doesn’t in any way diminish your love for me. I won’t pretend to know what it was like for you, waiting for him to show up, then dying without knowing how he was, where he was, what his plans were. I do know, though, that if he extends a hand, I’ll do the same.

Dax