And it struck me, sitting there, that this was perhaps the truest measure of what he had chosen.

It would have been so much less work simply to let his family love us.

It would have cost him nothing but the thing he could not bear to give up: being the sole channel through which everyone in his life reached everyone else.

He did not isolate us because it was easy.

He isolated us at tremendous, sustained effort, because control was worth more to him than his own children’s happiness, and he was willing to work for it, hard, for eleven years.

That is not weakness or cowardice.