“Like leukemia?” I once asked, as we drove away from the doctor’s office, thinking of the hokey Lurlene McDaniels books scattered around my middle school classrooms, in which innocent cheerleaders bravely fought some sort of cancer or another, hoping to get one kiss before they died. I knew he’d had some kind of “blood problem” for a while he’d explained that much when we accompanied him to get his blood drawn during our summers together. Since my brother and I spent most of our time with my mother and stepfather, two hours from Dad in a small town south of Louisville, his life seemed far away when we weren’t with him. Dad taught business law at Eastern Kentucky University and served as a deacon at our church. I didn’t want to know.įor the previous four months, my father had been in and out of the hospital in Lexington, Ky., half an hour from this rented duplex in Richmond, where he’d lived since he and my mother divorced three years earlier. I didn’t know what he was going to tell me.

We sat on the itchy baby-blue blanket on my bed in the room I shared with my 8-year-old brother. On a Saturday afternoon in April 1992, when I was 13, my father told me we needed to talk.