But the shape of it changed, completely and forever.

The wall of bitterness I had built and lived behind for ten years did not crumble to dust that afternoon.

But a door opened in it, for the first time, and through the door I could see my father not as a man who had stopped loving me, but as a man who had loved me so badly and so fearfully that he had broken both our hearts trying to keep me alive.

I do not want to make it sound simpler or cleaner than it was.