I have been trying to write this for two years.
Every time I start, I don’t know where to begin. Because the beginning is complicated. And the middle is complicated. And even the end — which should be the simple part, the part where everything resolves — is complicated too.
But I’m going to try.
My name is Josiah. I’m named after my grandfather.
I didn’t choose that. But I’ve spent most of my life figuring out what it means.
My mother was Black. My father was white. By the time I was old enough to understand what that meant, neither of them was around to explain it to me. They were both incarcerated before I started kindergarten. I don’t say that with bitterness anymore. It took a long time to get here, but I don’t.
My grandmother was already gone before I was born. So there was only one person left.
Pop.
Pop was a man of a certain generation and a certain geography and a certain set of beliefs that I will not soften for the sake of this story.
He was racist. Not in a quiet, polite way. In a loud, comfortable way — the way men are when they’ve never been challenged on it, when everyone around them nodded along for sixty years and nobody ever pushed back.
He was homophobic the same way.
And then his daughter went to prison and left him a biracial grandson he didn’t ask for, and life stopped asking him what he believed and started asking him what he was going to do.
He could have said no.
He didn’t.
I won’t pretend those early years were easy. They weren’t. I heard things in that house I was too young to hear. I felt things I didn’t have words for yet. There were moments I understood, even as a child, that some part of Pop looked at me and saw a problem he didn’t know how to solve.
But he fed me. He showed up to every school thing. He drove me to practice and sat in the bleachers and clapped louder than anyone when I did something worth clapping for.
He never said I love you easily. But he showed up. Every single time, he showed up.
I learned to hold both things at once — the harm and the love. A lot of us who grew up complicated learn that early.
I came out when I was nineteen.
I told Pop on a Tuesday afternoon in his kitchen. I had rehearsed it a hundred times. I had a plan for every version of his reaction.
He was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, I don’t understand it.
And then he said, But you’re my blood. And that doesn’t change.
It wasn’t a celebration. It wasn’t the father-son movie moment I had sometimes let myself imagine. But it was real. And from Pop, real was everything.
Over the years, something shifted in him. Slowly. The way glaciers move — you don’t see it happening, but one day you look up and the landscape has changed.
He asked about my partner. Started calling him by his name instead of avoiding it. Set a place for him at the table at Christmas without being asked. Never made a speech about it. Never asked for credit. Just quietly moved toward us like it was the most natural thing in the world, like he was always headed here and just needed more time than most.
I watched a man in his seventies decide to grow. I don’t know how many people understand how rare that is.
Pop passed two years ago. Quietly, in the house he’d lived in for forty years, in the town he’d never left.
I flew home to handle his things. I was not expecting anything. Pop was not a wealthy man. He lived simply, spent carefully, never talked about money.
His attorney called me three days after the funeral.
Pop had left me enough to cover the down payment on a house.
Not a fortune. But enough. More than enough.
The letter with it — written in his handwriting, which I hadn’t seen in years — said only this:
For you and Marcus. Build something good.
I sat in that attorney’s office and could not speak for a long time.
Because Pop never fully became a different man. He still had edges. He still said things sometimes that made me go quiet. He carried his history with him the way all of us do, right up until the end.
But somewhere along the way he decided that I mattered more than what he had always believed.
And he spent the last years of his life proving it in small ways, and then in one final way that I will carry for the rest of mine.
Marcus and I close on our house next month.
I’m going to plant something in the yard. Something that comes back every year without being asked.
I think Pop would understand that.
His name was Josiah. So is mine.
And I think I’m finally starting to understand what that means.
