“Of course, maybe he knew all that already. Maybe I just didn’t know that he knew it. And he didn’t know that I didn’t know so we just missed each other for thirty years. Or maybe he just didn’t give a fuck. Maybe he went to his grave genuinely disappointed that his eldest son was a fairy.

“The thing is, I have no way of telling. And I suppose that’s why I say he had it coming. I suppose what I really mean is we had it coming. That we would at some point in our lives have to reconcile ourselves either to gradually and politely becoming strangers, or to me telling him to go fuck himself. Because I’d hoped that—and I’ll never know if I was right, and perhaps I’m just projecting this retrospectively onto something I said in the heat of the moment—that there was no looking away from a go-fuck-yourself. David Blackwood was a complicated man, and he was the kind of man who only ever heard what he wanted to hear. But a loud, clear go-fuck-yourself…I thought that would get through to him. Or, if it didn’t, then at least I would know.

“Anyone who knew David—that’s the kind of thing you say at a funeral isn’t it, ‘anyone who knew David’—anyone who knew him would know that he was a man of statements. In his world, things were as they were and there was no interrogating that or changing it or denying it. I suppose that explains why he was so threatened by the idea of nonbinary people, even though he never met one. He believed what he believed and, like Thomas Jefferson, he considered those beliefs to be self-evident truths. He was a complicated man, but he was, at heart, a man of certainties.

“Which is why it’s so strange to me, strange and more than a little painful, that here, at the end, he has left, for me at least, only questions. Had he not, in his typically contrarian fashion, collapsed of a heart attack a few short weeks after I’d finally taken his advice—advice, Uncle Jim, you will be pleased that I remembered well from the halibut story—and stood up for myself, I might have known if we could perhaps…if he would have…

“But I won’t. I’ll never know.

“And that’s what death is really, isn’t it? A lot of things you’ll never know.

“Although, the truth is, I can’t help but feel that if I’d just told my father to go fuck himself ten years ago, we might have been in a much better place today. And I might have been able to stand here and join all of you in pretending my father was simple. Even though he wasn’t. Because none of us is.