Happy Post-Father’s Day.

One thing’s true: we all have fathers — good, bad, absent, or trying their best. We didn’t get to pick ours. Didn’t get to choose when or where we were born, or what kind of man brought us here. One day, we just showed up. That was their doing.

It’s miraculous and random all at once. One galactic spin, and there you were — born to a man you didn’t choose, in a place you never planned.

I hope you got a good one.

They say all men are created equal. Nonsense. Some are born into love. Some into silence. Some into lives of high education and comfort. Some into war zones, poverty, or pain. Some are raised by men who had no idea how to love, because they never saw it themselves.

A father gives what he can. Or what he knows. Or what he has left. Some of us grew up with men who were already broken when we arrived.

My dad, my family? Complicated.

I grew up in a broken family. My father had once been full of potential. Intelligent, charming, capable, handsome. But he carried a genetic time bomb: Machado-Joseph Disease — a degenerative genetic condition that slowly paralyzed him while his mind stayed perfectly clear. Like Lou Gehrig’s, only worse.

Symptoms came in his late thirties — numbness, then stumbling, then collapse. Eventually, he couldn’t walk, talk, or move. But he could think. He could suffer. He was trapped in a dead body with a working brain — for 20........

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