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.
They had the same laugh.
They had the same pattern of going quiet when they were hurt rather than saying so, which meant they spent a lot of years going quiet at each other without ever quite resolving what the quiet was about.
After Eric’s divorce five years ago — a painful one, the kind that required everyone in the family to take positions they didn’t want to take — he and my father had a falling-out of the kind that has a specific cause that both people can identify but that is really about the accumulation of twenty years of smaller failures of communication. They spoke at Christmas and birthdays. They were polite. They were not close.
I know my father grieved this.
He did not say so in words. But I watched him for six months of illness and I saw the way he looked when Eric’s name came up, and I saw the phone calls he made that were shorter than he would have wanted them to be, and I saw him one evening sitting at the kitchen table with a sheet of paper in front of him, writing something in his careful engineer’s print, stopping, starting again.
I did not ask what he was writing.
I have thought about that a great deal since the day of the funeral.
The morning of my father’s funeral was cold and clear.
October in our part of the state has a particular quality — the light comes in sideways in a way that makes everything look more significant than it would in July, and the air has the specific smell of things ending and things beginning simultaneously, and you feel slightly more alive in it than you do in gentler weather, which is either a gift or an irony depending on why you’re outside.
I had driven to the funeral home early.
I was there when they opened the doors, in the black dress I had bought specifically for this occasion and the shoes my father had given me for my birthday two years ago, which felt right, wearing something he had given me to the day we said goodbye to him.
Eric arrived late.
Not dramatically late, not missed-the-beginning late, but late enough that people had found their seats and the room had settled into its particular quiet and then the door opened and Eric walked in.
And every person in the room, in the peripheral way that people do, registered his entrance.
Because he was wearing red.
Not burgundy. Not wine. Not the deep, forgivable red that could be mistaken for dark in bad lighting. Red. Bright, confident, unambiguous red, a suit that fit him well and that he carried with the exhausted dignity of a man who had made a decision he was standing behind.
I watched him walk to the front of the chapel.
I watched him stand in front of our father’s casket and look down at it with an expression I could not read from where I was sitting.
Then he came and sat beside me.
I leaned in.
What the hell are you wearing?
He kept his eyes forward.
Not now, Sarah.
Dad would have hated this.
He turned to look at me then, and what was in his expression stopped me — not anger, not defensiveness. Something tired and certain and private.
No, he said quietly. He wouldn’t.
And then the service began.