The Questions I Never Asked My Father |
“What was it like to hang out with you in college?” my 20-year-old son asked me one night last summer.
I was stunned—not just by the question, but by the realization that I had never asked my own father the same thing before he died of cancer when I was my son’s age.
It struck me that this kind of unasked question is not unusual. For many men, the father-son relationship is defined by an emotional distance that is quietly passed down from generation to generation. We walk beside our fathers, but at a remove.
To fill the silence, my son ventured a guess. “You were probably antisocial.”
My wife stepped in and offered a generous vote of confidence: “Papa was a lot of fun in college.”
I fumbled through an answer. “I was fun,” I blurted, almost defensively. “Always up for a beer.”
I didn’t really know my father. Without knowing it, I was at risk of perpetuating the same distance with my own son.
After my father’s funeral, someone I’d never met introduced himself and told me he’d traveled through Asia with my father after they graduated from college. Really? How did I not know about that trip? About that person?
But then again, did my son know about the three-week backpacking trip I took to Alaska after I graduated from college? Did he know about the cross-country drive his mother and I took after that trip, about the club........