My father and his younger brother tried to make me a man by forcing me to learn how to fish. Towards the end of my fourteenth winter, as soon as the lake thawed, my father wanted his father to begin training me.
I don’t believe that I will ever like Michelle, even though I love who she is when she is my brother. I want to accept the arrangement, but I am still having trouble processing the fact that the person I rely on is not him.
When your great-grandparents grew up in Stalin’s terror-famine, your grandparents in the Holocaust, and your parents in a straddle between totalitarianism and democracy, you grew up confused about pain. Were you entitled to it? Was it real?