“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 hopping in Seattle, the hikes along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon? Did he know about the time when my best friend Chris and I cut science class to see the Jerry Garcia Band? Did he know that the best $20 I ever spent was on a perfect-quality 1978 Springsteen bootleg I stumbled upon during one of my monthly high school pilgrimages to Greenwich Village?
Or did he only see me as I saw my father: a lawyer who worked in some skyscraper downtown?
I knew my father only in broad strokes. I knew his integrity; I witnessed it in small moments, like when he carefully filled out customs forms after family trips despite my mother insisting nobody declared the real value of their purchases. I knew his character; when I got caught in a high school drinking scandal, he calmly advised, “Just go to the principal’s office and tell the truth.” I knew his laugh, the beautiful progression of it, the way it started with his whole body convulsing, then devolved into a coughing fit that came in triplicate guttural hacks and finally ended with the wipe of his eyes and the blow of his nose into the white handkerchief he always had close by.
But the intimate details are missing from my memory. Who was his best friend? His first crush? What were his passions? And most critically, what was he like? Was he shy, mischievous, a rebel? He never offered. And I never asked.
This failure to know my father as a man contributed to the emotional distance I felt between us my whole life, but particularly at the end of his. Looking back, it surprises me that even the cancer wasn’t enough to make us reach for each other. In fact, it pushed us further into our emotional corners as we tried to “be strong” for each other. He never once brought up the fact that he might die, never once told me I’d be okay, or even that he loved me. I didn’t bring it up either. I never told him how I sometimes woke in the middle of the night, terrified, hoping it was all a dream.
A musical hero of mine, Soundgarden’s frontman Chris Cornell, once said about parenting that every generation has a responsibility to break the bad cycles it inherits. My father, it seems, repeated them; our emotional distance was his inheritance.
When my paternal grandfather wrote a 43-page summary of his life, my father received just six sentences: schools attended, awards received, spouse’s name. By contrast, my grandfather devoted lavish detail to his legal career and a case that “involved a very interesting question, that is, the allocation of a stock dividend on a large block of stock of an insurance company.”
From what I could tell, their relationship was based more on mutual respect, a shared appreciation for their respective professional accomplishments as lawyers, than a deep well of familial love. As a kid, I sat bored stiff through countless conversations about my father’s latest corporate deals. I don’t recall any conversations between my father and grandfather that revealed who they truly were.
And so when my son asked about my college years, I wondered if he and I might be starting to break the cycle of emotional distance fathers often pass down to their sons—trying, in some small way, to heed Cornell’s directive.
That’s the hope, anyway—that my son knows me not just as “Dad,” but as a person. It’s why, the night he was born, I sang to him not “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” but the Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace,” and kept singing my favorites to him at bedtime until he started beating me at chess.
It’s also why my closest friends and I started visiting each other’s kids at college. Each semester, we spend a weekend with one of them—a chance to see them in their element, away from home, away from us, becoming whoever they’re becoming.
It’s a chance, too, for the kids to see their dads not just as parents, but as people, laughing at old stories about bribing our way to better concert seats, cornering Dickey Betts for an autograph after an Allman Brothers Band show, and gorging on late-night barbecue along the Mississippi blues trail.
And maybe, if we’re doing this right, to ask: what was it like to hang out with you in college?
