I have thought about those five words more than I have thought about almost any others in my life, and my feelings about them have changed over the years.

At first they filled me with a rage so pure it frightened me — five words, to abandon a child, less writing than you’d leave for a houseguest about the coffee maker.

Later, when the rage cooled, I came to a stranger and sadder reading of them.

Because I think Warren believed those words.

I think, in the wreckage of that night, he genuinely looked at himself and concluded he was not built to raise his son, and I think he was even right, and I think that is the whole tragedy of him.

The difference between Warren and me was never that he was weak and I was strong.