The Questions I Never Asked My Father

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.”