Matt Fogelson shares about the relationship with his father and raising his son.
“What was it like to hang out with you in college?” my 20-year-old son asked me one night last summer. The question caught me off guard — not because I didn’t have an answer, but because I realized I’d never asked my own father the same thing before he died of cancer when I was my son’s age.
I fumbled through a response anyway— something about being fun, always up for a beer. My son guessed I was probably antisocial. My wife, overhearing, offered a vote of confidence: “Papa was a lot of fun in college.” We laughed, but the moment lingered. I didn’t really know my father — not as a person. I knew his integrity: the way he carefully filled out customs forms after family trips, even when my mother insisted nobody declared the real value. I knew his laugh.
But I didn’t know who he was at 20– his closest friends, his first crush, what made him feel most like himself.
I never asked. He never offered. And by the time I realized those were questions worth asking, it was too late. Looking back, what strikes me most is that even his cancer didn’t break through that distance. We never talked about the possibility that he might die.
We never said what mattered most. When my paternal grandfather wrote a 43-page memoir late in life, my father received six sentences. It was all about my grandfather’s career as a lawyer. My father died before he got the chance to read it. I’m not sure his near omission would have registered if he had.