Motivated to take this odyssey by fond recollections of road trips with his father, Bissinger tried to capture lightning in a bottle and reconstruct those precious father-son moments with Zach. But Bissinger’s attempts to connect frequently left him feeling frustrated. For example, what he thought would be the crowning moment of the trip, a night in Las Vegas, fell apart because Zach was overcome and disinterested. Bissinger was angry and disappointed with his son at first, then he turned the fury on himself. It was at a Cirque de Soleil show when Bissinger realized that what he’d thought would be one of the best nights of his son’s life was crumbling. “Tears fill my eyes, as I face the fact that, all night long, I have done nothing but push my son beyond all limits of what is reasonable and right,” he said. “. . . Everything I have learned from and about him on the trip cannot eradicate that so much will always be overwhelming and incomprehensible to him.”

Among the hardest parts to read were those where Bissinger tried to speak candidly with Zach about his disabilities, a subject which Bissinger hadn’t really thoroughly discussed with Zach in an attempt to protect him. The scene where they returned to a school where Zach had been treated abysmally -- yet Zach didn’t realize he’d been treated badly -- was particularly agonizing for Bissinger because it brought him back to time and place in his life when he felt unable to adequately help his child.

“There is no rose-colored ending to any of this,” Bissinger wrote unflinchingly. “There is no pretty little package with a tidy bow. [Zach] will never drive a car. He will never marry. He will never have children. I still fear for his future . . . He is not the child I wanted. But he is no longer a child anyway. He is a man, the most fearless I have ever known, friendly, funny, freaky, unfathomable, forgiving, fantastic, restoring the faith of a father in all that can be.”

The portrait Bissinger painted, of lugging along with them the heavy iron chains of his paternal guilt, a bag full of family photos and haunting memories, did eventually offer a glimmer of, not hope necessarily, but poignancy in the end. At the conclusion of the trip when his son Gerry joined the duo, Bissinger found himself moved by his sons’ camaraderie in spite of how differently their lives turned out. “Three minutes does define a life, but never in the way I had always imagined,” he said. “So many times I never thought I would get there. But we are a family, all different, sometimes divided, sometimes in pain, but unconquerable.”

Originally published on ModernMom