I spent years avoiding fatherhood. Then my brother died when his sons were 6 and 2.

Not because of things like diapers, money, or freedom.

The feeling I had was older than that, more like a scar than a decision.

My own father has been a stranger my whole life, a man I share a last name with and nothing else.

And while he stayed gone, my mother kept trying to fill the hole he left: four marriages, men who walked through our lives and right back out.

By the time I was 16, “father” was just a word that I equated with slammed doors.

So, I made myself a promise, I wouldn’t become one more man who left.

The easiest way to keep that promise was never to have a kid to leave in the first place.

Then life threw my family some unexpected curveballs.

Almost twelve years ago, my brother died.

He left two boys behind; they were just 6 and 2 at the time.

They were too little to really remember him, big enough to feel the shape of what was missing.

I noticed it at the funeral, then at every gathering after, the way their eyes moved around the rooms, looking.

They seemed to be searching for their dad in other men’s faces, without even knowing it.

And something in me, I’d spent my whole life trying to cut out, just stepped forward.

To them, I was still their “Gunkle,” as they affectionately called me.

This mostly meant being the guy who shows up to school plays and birthdays, usually standing between their mom, aunt, and their grandmas.

The harder job, for me, was always keeping a dead man in the room. “Your dad would’ve laughed at that.

He loved you both so much, out loud, before you could even talk, he was crying in the hospital parking lot the day you came home.

The only thing your father ever wanted was to watch you grow up.

So, I get to, for him,” are just a few of the lines I would slip into our interactions, which were becoming more and more frequent.

There’s just the slow understanding that if you don’t carry him, he’s gone for good.

I fought the idea that I needed to be more than I originally was to them the whole way.

I told myself it was temporary, I was just filling in.

Over time, I came to accept that this wasn’t the case at all.

Now my nephews are 18 and almost 14.

We’ve had the talks, the ones they more than likely would’ve had with my brother.

Last month, the older one was halfway out the door to meet a girl when I called out to him. “When you’re with that girl,” I said, “or anybody, you remember you come from women who crossed everything to give you a childhood.

You don’t take, you don’t lie, you don’t make somebody feel small to make yourself feel big.

That’s not love.” He was quiet for a second.

Then, real low, responded, “You think my dad would’ve said it better?” “No,” I said. “He’d have made it weird.

But he’d have meant the same thing.” He laughed.

And there it was, the whole thing I never wanted, looking back at me.

I spent my life being positive that I’d be yet one more man who disappeared, that it was in my blood, like an inheritance you can’t outrun.

Instead, I’ve given my nephews the father figure they needed, and I’ve done so every day for the past 12 years.

As a queer man, their gay uncle, with no script for any of this, I at least knew I wanted those boys to grow into men who respect people and honor the powerful women they were born from — a mother, aunt, and grandmothers who carried a whole family across an ocean.

And that is something I think I am succeeding at.