The Blood That Binds and the Knives That Cut
When I got the call that my dad had cancer, I didn’t hesitate. I raced down to see him, to make sure he was still standing, still him. He and Nick had a relationship that was different—more like a husband and wife where one party kept secrets, and the other pretended not to notice. Nick was a codependent bitch boy, and my dad liked having someone orbit him like that. It worked for them.
When I got to town, Dad asked me to go with him to the doctor’s office in Uptown Whittier. We sat in the waiting room, and I could already tell something had shifted. He wasn’t his usual masculine, dominant self. He was smaller. Like the fight had been drained from him before he even walked through the door.
They called us into the little examination room. The doctor came in—tall, pale, white-blond hair, blue eyes, looked like he stepped out of some German military recruitment ad. He opened my dad’s file and started talking.
Not about curing anything.
Not about beating this.
Just about extending life.
He talked about what they’d seen before with this kind of cancer. What treatments could slow it down. What my dad would experience while they poisoned his body in the hope of buying him a few extra months. I let them talk, half-listening while flipping through a People magazine. When I finally looked up, I caught my dad staring at the floor, his shoulders slumped, his eyes dull—like a dog that just realized it had been abandoned at the shelter.
I’d never seen him like that before.
The doctor explained the plan—surgery to remove the lymph nodes, followed by radiation, then chemotherapy to shrink the tumors. It wasn’t a cure. It was a stall tactic.
I went with him to his first chemo session, sat beside him while the poison dripped into his veins. I was there for the first radiation treatment, when they tattooed marks onto his skin so they could blast the same areas over and over again.
Just me and him.
Through all of it.
When he started talking about his estate, he looked at me and said, Jimmy, you’ve always been the smart one. You handle this.
The house would be split three ways. I’d get all the high-end guns—the ones from the ‘60s, the good shotguns. Nick would get the junk—old WWII relics with cracked stocks, busted Israeli military rifles. Ryan? No guns. He had a temper, and Dad didn’t want to hand him a loaded mistake.
Money in the bank, split three ways. The house, fully paid for. A garage full of old childhood relics, things none of us really wanted but were there nonetheless.
But I knew my brothers. Knew they had never had money like this before. Knew Ryan would need something solid to help with his child support mess. So I suggested a trust. Something to keep the house in all three of our names, use the money to fix it up, rent it out, and split the income evenly. The guns would be divided the way Dad wanted. Everything else would be handled cleanly.
Dad agreed.
I went back to Oregon. He kept going through treatments. And for a while, he actually seemed happy. Like he’d found some peace in the idea that things were set up, that we’d all be okay.
Then, when I handed him the trust papers, he hesitated.
No, no, Jimmy. We’ll do this later. Not yet.
Later never came.
A few weeks passed, and I got the call.
Dad had taken a turn for the worse. The cancer had spread. He was in a coma, hooked up to machines that were just keeping his body warm.
I rushed back down.
And there he was. Untouchable. Already gone in every way except biologically.
I sat next to him, talking, watching tears slip from his closed eyes. I must have said I love you more times in that one night than I had in my entire life.
Too manly to say it before. Too late to take it back now.
Nick and I had a falling out during that trip. Another drunken night, another brotherly disaster. Ryan was Ryan—floating in and out of things, never fully present, never fully absent.
When the time came to decide about pulling the plug, Nick stepped up like he was the man in charge. At that point, my resentment toward him had peaked, so I waved him off.
“Fine. Try not to fuck it up.”
I went back home.
Nick and Ryan took turns sitting by Dad’s bed. But Nick—being the company man—had his $10-an-hour job to go back to. Ryan—being Ryan—decided he was hungry and left to grab something to eat.
And while he was gone, Dad died.
Alone.
Not one of those stupid motherfuckers had the decency to stay with him, to hold his hand, to be there.
They handled the cremation without me. Didn’t include me in any of it. I wasn’t even told what was happening.
A few weeks later, they went out on a boat to scatter his ashes at sea. Supposedly, a few of Dad’s old friends were there.
And, because my family can’t do anything without turning it into a disaster, my brothers got into a fistfight on the boat.
Ryan wanted Dad’s eleven cars. Nick, who had been living in the house rent-free and had control over Dad’s bank account, decided that was selfish. But instead of handling it like grown men, they threw fists over their dead father’s remains.
Then came the real mess—probate.
Nick, now firmly in my mother’s pocket, dragged everything out, stalled and delayed until Ryan had to subpoena him out of the house to take control of the estate.
Ryan called me during all of this, but I was knee-deep in my own divorce, fighting my own war. I told him, Sign whatever you need me to sign. I don’t want to get involved in the drama.
That sentence would come back to haunt me.
Months later, I was drinking a grapefruit juice and vodka first thing in the morning, sifting through a pile of legal bullshit that had been mailed to me. Divorce papers. Court notices. The usual.
Then I saw something different.
A double printed documents all compressed into an envelope .
My dad’s estate.
It listed his beneficiaries.
Ryan and Nick.
Not me.
I wasn’t mentioned anywhere.
I wasn’t reactionary about it. I just called a attorney in LA, gave him the case number.
“Dude,” he said, “this is happening in thirty minutes. I’ll be there.”
He stormed into the courthouse just as they were about to wrap things up, catching them all off guard. He stood up, voice steady, and laid it out for the judge—the third son had been left out.
Then, like clockwork, my mother slithered to her feet.
She straightened her posture, put on that well-practiced, manipulative air, and in the most convincing voice, declared, The adoption was never finalized. It was just something we told him so he wouldn’t feel bad.
With that, she tried to erase me from existence.
If I wasn’t legally my father’s son, I wasn’t entitled to a goddamn thing.
My lawyer called me immediately. “She’s hostile. She’s convincing. She’s making it sound airtight,” he said.
Sounded exactly like my mother.
The court gave us 40 days to prove otherwise.
We secured my birth certificate—clear as day, my father’s last name, proof that the adoption had been finalized. No loopholes, no technicalities. We filed the paperwork, and the judge ruled in my favor.
My attorney, who had a front-row seat to the circus that was my family, was baffled. He watched my mother stand in court, blatantly deny reality, claim the documents were forged—even with her own signature staring back at her.
In the end, the estate was split three ways, but there wasn’t much left to split. Probate fees had bled it dry. Legal battles had eaten up the scraps. And Nick—who hadn’t just been squatting in the house for free but looting it—had already burned through whatever cash was in Dad’s bank account. By the time Ryan finally forced him out, he had already stolen anything worth taking.
The estate was split three ways, but it was already gutted—probate fees, legal fights, Nick who was not just living there for free, but was stealing whatever he could before he got thrown out of the house and used all the money in dads bank account.
Ryan messaged me later.
“You told me before you didn’t want any of this.”
I told him it wasn’t about the money. It was about the fact that they had made this entire thing a goddamn shitshow.
We never spoke again.
My dad raised three sons. He was a father who sacrificed everything to keep us together. Every weekend, he showed up. He took the hits from our mother, endured the hell she put him through—right up until the end, and even after. He never dated, never built a new life for himself, never shut us out. We were his everything, and we felt it.
And yet, in the end, we all went our separate ways.
Ryan followed in our mother’s footsteps, swallowed by her bitterness and bad decisions. Nick remained a needy, codependent wreck, forever looking for someone to latch onto. And me—the adopted one, the one they tried to erase—I carried more of my father in me than either of them ever would.
