He made me swear in a car park outside a garden centre.
I was eighteen. I swore because he asked me to, and because he was crying, and because I did not have the faintest idea what I was agreeing to.
The reason he would not tell them is the part that people find hardest, and it is not complicated at all when you have met my father.
Our father does not have bad news. He has problems, and problems have solutions, and a man who cannot produce a solution has not tried.
Rhys had watched him do it to a cousin in 2013 and to his own brother in 2016.
He said, in that car park: he’ll make it about what I should have done.
And he was right. I know he was right, because eight years later, in a kitchen, my father said to me — about Rhys, about the diagnosis, about a boy who had been dead for eight years — he should have gone in sooner.
Before treatment started, he stored samples. Everybody in his position is offered it and most people say yes without thinking about it very hard.
And then, later, when it had gone the way it went, he asked me.
His girlfriend had left in the November. There was nobody else. And they had told him what they tell people when the numbers are what his were.
Leo is not the child of a married man or a man twice my age.
He is my brother’s son.
I was three weeks along when I told them because I knew the exact date of the transfer. It was in a diary.
If I end this, it won’t just be me it happens to.
I meant that there would be nothing of Rhys left at all. I was nineteen and that was the best sentence I could find and it was a terrible one.
He passed that June.
I did not know.
I had changed my number and moved states and my mother had no way of reaching me that she was willing to use.
I found out three weeks afterwards from a cousin who tracked down the girl whose room I was renting.
I missed my own brother’s funeral.
And that is why my parents’ hands were shaking on that porch.
Because for ten years they have believed that their son died at twenty-three and left nothing behind him at all.
