It’s easy for me to forget that I’ve got my own selfishness to own up to. My relationship with Dad is cordial, but I neglect him. Writing is his preferred medium. Not email, but carefully written letters sent via US Post. I have dozens of letters and postcards recording his summer wanderings around the country.

When my mom and he were getting divorced he told each of us how he felt in letters.

I found out he was marrying Margaret via a written letter sent to me in my junior year of college.

After my grandmother died, and Dad was distributing the trust funds, he began the letter that accompanied the checks with my grandmother’s life story, told in the most detached and sparse language.

Last year, he wrote us all letters to tell us he’d just had successful surgery for prostate cancer, a disease we didn’t even know he’d had. “This is good news,” he began. I’m not going to die, he said. I wonder how he would have put it if the news had not been so optimistic.

If it weren’t for my stepmother, I would be getting a letter this Wednesday telling me that my dad had just come out of open heart surgery and was feeling fine, thank you very much.

These letters infuriate me. Not so much the letters he sends when he’s on the road; those are wonderful. He must spend hours illustrating the details of his surroundings, the people he’s met along the way, how he’s interpreting the experiences. I resent the letters he writes when something important has happened, where he is very careful about his words, where he distances himself from our reactions, forces us to come to him for further discussion. He robs me of the opportunity to be supportive, to be there, “just in case.” I told him this after the Cancer Letters came out, but he refused to see my perspective. “I would do it again,” he said. Stubborn old man, I thought. Selfish bastard.

I still think his way of communicating potentially upsetting news is passive-aggressive and I’ll keep telling him how much I hate it. But I have to admit this to myself: the biggest reason these letters bother me is that they usually come after a long, long silence between us. They are always the marker between months without phone calls or any other gesture from my end. They always remind me that I’m still letting the lingering anger and resentment from my childhood get in the way of what should be a pretty decent adult relationship with my father. This power—the power to deny him a part in my life—is my last weapon against him. The last weapon in a battle I myself called an end to years ago. At least I thought I had.

But now my dad has email.