“How weird it is to have a sibling.” That’s what the writer said the other day. “There is this person that is the closest thing to you that you can get. But is not you. How heartbreaking that is. And how close and far away you can feel.”*

Last month my siblings and I — my two brothers, one seven years my senior, the other two years my junior — made what we all believe will be the last trip to see our 90-year-old father. The occasion was his birthday, although he had no idea why we were there.

My younger brother called our group text thread “the Brothers Parzencheski,” an allusion to a disputed variant of our last name, a patryonymic obtained through our grandmother’s second marriage.

The farcical title was also a reference to the “Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoevsky’s 19th-century novel that tells the story of three brothers each suspected of killing their father, each with a conspicuous motive. “A nice little family,” as the author calls them in the paratext.

It wasn’t that our father was actually dying. But a series of possibly countless strokes in recent years have severely impacted his mental faculties and memory, short and long term.

In previous years when lucidity was still within his grasp, his disposition became increasingly hostile to everyone around him, especially his doctors. But now that his mind is gone, he seems perfectly content to eat and metabolize — the two of the few human activities he’s still capable of.

All three of us were startled by how frail and feeble he’s become.

Siblings may be the closest far-away thing to you. But parents are also uncannily similar to you. Because not only did they make you, but your sense of what it means to be a person is also deeply shaped by their nature and nurturing, or the lack thereof.

“A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him,” wrote Dostoevsky’s narrator, “and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures.”

They could have been talking about my father.

Many years have passed since I finally came to terms with the fact that he is a person incapable of love. But somewhere deep inside of me, there was still a faint, wrong-headed hope that one day he would apologize for not loving us. For the havoc he created by ripping our lives — and the lives of so many strangers — apart.

The Brothers Parzencheski took their father, his wife, and her daughter out to dinner. He kept asking us what we were celebrating. He enjoyed his beef tips, braised in red wine.

After the meal, the three of us went to bar and mused over beers about what it would be like to attend his funeral.

Grand plans for a run on the lake early the next morning, to be followed by breakfast at a favorite greasy spoon, were laid to rest by the rain. And the fact that both my brothers slept in until late. I didn’t even seem them again.

But I did see my father one more — one last? — time.

As I sat on an armchair and listened to him talk nonsense for the better part of a half hour, I couldn’t help but notice the aviator frames he’s always worn, for both his corrective and sun glasses.

He still looks good in them, I thought to myself. As a matter of fact, I look good in them, too, I said to myself, eyeing my RayBan aviators on an end table.

It was raining hard when I managed to get my Tesla rental onto the ferry — the last car on the boat.

It’s the official summer of global warming and world was the hottest it’s ever been. But here, just an hour or so south of the Canadian border along the Thruway, the weather was — as a friend put it after seeing an Instagram post — Jurassic. As the Italian cineastes say, it was a landscape as an emotional state of being.

It took me nearly two hours in the heavy rain to get to the airport across the lake. But the sun came out just as I was rolling into Burlington.

I parked my rental in the parking garage and made my way to the agency desk too drop off my key. As I handed the fob to the agent, she told me that a number of flights had been canceled. She said she would hold my rental open because she suspected I was going to be stuck there.

A panic washed over me. If didn’t make it back to Texas by the next morning, I’d leave my wife, my kids, and my work in the lurch.

I took off my aviators and laid them on the counter so I could use my reading glasses to check my flight status. My flight was on time. A wave of relief followed. Still feeling the anxiety about missing my plane, I made a dash toward the gate.

After going through security, I treated myself to a beer and a poutine. It was only after I got settled at the restaurant’s counter that I realized I had left my RayBans on the counter at the car rental. I tried frantically and repeatedly to call the desk but I couldn’t through. It was too late to back out to the busy airport and back through the line for security without missing my flight.

My shades were gone. And I had said goodbye to my father.

* Ottessa Moshfegh on a recent New Yorker “Fiction” podcast.