Father-son advice needed: Is it too late to get to know my dad better?

In My Humble Opinion
1

(Sorry for the length here. And mods, please feel free to move to MPSIMS if it’s better there.)

My father is getting up there in age, and I don’t really know how much longer he has. I would like to try to get know him a bit better while I still can and while he’s still lucid, but I don’t really know how to. Any advice from you older gents out there, or anyone experienced with this sort of dynamic?

I’m in my early 40s now, and my dad is in his 80s. He had me late, the product of a second marriage. We were never close to begin with, and we fought a lot when I was a kid. Things are better now as an adult — we’re cordial and generally tolerant of each other — but still nothing approaching “close”. Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to get him to come visit more, and I try to talk to him when I can, but the conversations are usually short and utilitarian. Last time he visited, he was in town for an entire week, but spent the overwhelming majority of it in his hotel room and only 6-8 hours (total) with me.

This is not how I am with most people in my life.

Lately, I’ve been wondering what I’d say at his funeral. It would start with, “My dad was a decent, hard-working man…” and then my mind draws a blank. I don’t really know what to say beyond that, and it saddens me. What can I do to change that?

There’s a lot to unpack here, and I could end up writing a (terribly boring) novel if I’m not careful. So I’ll use bullet points in an attempt to be somewhat succinct…

  • He’s much older than me, and there is a large generation gap between us in terms of our respective eras’ cultural zeitgeists.

  • There is also a language and culture gap. He grew up in China before immigrating to the US and going to college here. He speaks mostly fluent, but not quite native, English. I was American-educated. We’re mostly able to get by code-switching between two languages as needed, but it does make deeper discussions difficult. More than that, though, it means we have very little in common in terms of shared cultural experiences, whether in terms of entertainment or history or values or aspirations.

  • (He is a US voter by immigration.) Politically we’re not quite enemies, but don’t quite see eye-to-eye either. I’m generally quite left-of-center economically, while he’s what I’d call a “tiny-c” conservative: not Republican per se and thankfully not MAGA, but more along the Reagan-esque fiscal conservative of “people should bootstrap themselves and are chiefly responsible to their family”. He *hates* unhoused people with a burning passion (“they have two arms and two legs; I washed dishes to pay my way through college, they can do the same”), doesn’t believe much in social services (despite living abroad for access to cheaper healthcare), etc.

    Culturally we’re both more centrist/tolerant, probably the result of us both having lived in several different cultures. Nominally, we’re both independent voters in the US. Many of our arguments, whether about my life own choices or the US’s direction, center around the distinction between what he sees as individual moral failings and what I see as systemic failures of a society. But for the most part, we’ve learned to avoid discussing politics or the economy altogether.

  • We have no interests or hobbies in common. He never really had any hobbies aside from watching TV and reading Shakespeare a lot in his younger days (but that eventually stopped, and as far as I know, he did not take up reading other books). When I was a kid, he never had any friends or social visits — as in, I literally cannot remember a single friend of his, or any time he spent with someone other than my mother and me. Thankfully, in retirement, he did manage to make a few mahjong friends and now spends a lot of time with them.

  • His personality was always… difficult. He’s quick to anger and frequently interrupts, assuming (usually incorrectly) that he knows what you’re about to say. On many a phone conversation, I was unable to finish a single sentence, despite begging him to listen for a moment. He just can’t seem to help himself…

  • He was never abusive, but frequently upset and angry, and prone to throwing things across the house (or in one instance, making a terrible scene in a restaurant and tossing things across the restaurant… we left in shame)

  • He’s twice-divorced and now onto his third wife. He and his new wife get along much better than he and my mother ever did. The divorce was amicable.

  • My mother, despite being 20 years younger than him, earned more than him, was way more social than him, was handier around the house, was more generally successful in life and in work, and frequently “wore the pants”, so to speak. I think (but am not sure) he may have felt emasculated because of this, leading to a very strained marriage from the get-go that only got worse with time. (Thankfully their relationship improved a lot after the divorce).

Phew. It’s a lot, right? I’d drag him to therapy with me if I could, but he would never deign to do such a thing — a common mentality of Asian men of his generation, I believe — and he still lives in another country, besides.

I don’t really know how I could even start to fix things. We’re not exactly estranged, but our relationship feels entirely, well, perfunctory, even though I’m his only son. He also has a daughter from a previous marriage long ago, but they’re not also not close. She, my half-sister, also finds him quite difficult.

I feel like I’ve been a disappointment to him his whole life, something that I’ve learned to accept, but he never could. He wanted me to be a doctor/engineer/white-collar professional, while I ended up much more drawn to conservation and the outdoors and the humanities, and the much lower social brackets that typically accompany those interests. I’m happy with my life choices, but he is not, and whenever I try to talk to him about work or life, it often devolves into some variant of “when are you going to get a real job?”. He’s softened a bit with age… what used to be met with righteous indignation is now often just met with a passive resignation. We’ve learned to avoid angering each other, which unfortunately means we’ve learned to avoid discussing most topics of substance.

There is no other person in my life I have such struggles with. While I’m not a social butterfly, I’m generally a friendly, open, and communicative person — with my partner, other family members, coworkers, friends, etc. It is such a stark difference to the relationship I have with my dad. He’s the only person who angers me on a regular basis (usually because he never lets me finish my sentences before interrupting and yelling). Despite my best efforts, I feel like I’ve made zero progress despite several years (as a middle-aged adult) of trying to get to know him better. I don’t need him to suddenly agree with me, I just wish we could accept our disagreements, move on, and focus on whatever we do have in common… except there might not be anything we actually have in common.

Over the years, all the dysfunctions grew, the heaviness wore on both of us, and I think we’ve mostly just learned to “live and let live”. It works and is definitely less stressful than it used to be, but it just feels… fake and shallow. Is that as good as it’ll ever be?

Is there anything I can do to try to work on it, bit by bit, before it’s entirely too late…?

2

An 80-year-old with that kind of personality is not going to change very much. If you want to get to know him, you’ll need to get to know him for who he is. Try to distance yourself emotionally from the behaviors that bother you. If he interrupts you, oh well, let him get his thoughts out. You may not get him to see things from your point of view or treat you in the way you want to be treated. That’s true for many curmudgeonly and irascible people, and even worse for old people who are set in their ways. You’ll probably have to accept him for who he is and know he will treat you in that manner. You’re likely setting yourself up to be disappointed if you create expectations that he’ll change his personality in ways that are more compatible with yours. He is who he is and you’ll need to decide if you want to know more about that person rather than the person you wish he were.

If you want to just spend time with him and learn more about him that way, get involved with any hobbies or pasttimes he has. If it’s just mahjong, then play mahjong with him. But do so without any grand expectations. Just play mahjong and learn whatever bits and pieces about him that comes out through casual conversation during the game. It sounds like he doesn’t really like talking about himself or personal stuff, so be conscientious of whether he wants to talk about stuff or not. Pressing him to talk about stuff he doesn’t want to talk about is probably not going to go well. And based on your relationship, it may be a long while before he feels like opening up to you. It sounds like he’s not really an open person in general, so you might not really get a lot out no matter what you do. But the more time you can spend with him, the more connected you both will feel to each other. I’m sure he would like that even if you don’t end up with a super deep connection.

3

I’m in my late 50s, and my father is 84. It’s a similar situation for us: we’ve never been all that close. He abandoned us kids when I was 13 years old, and it has soured my opinion of him ever since. Even though he lives about 40 minutes from me, I only stop by his house a couple times a year. We will have a cordial conversation, but I know it’s awkward for him. The reason is that he became a fundamentalist Christian about 35 years ago, and the only thing he wants to talk about is the Bible, God, Jesus, etc. He knows I don’t want to talk about that stuff, which means he has no idea what to talk about.

As mentioned by @filmore, your father isn’t going to change. Neither is my father.

As for my father, I’ll continue to stop by and see him every now and then. Though I’m not sure why, as it’s doubtful either of us get anything out of it. But I just feel like there’s a small obligation on my part to keep in touch; it just wouldn’t feel right to me to completely sever ties. Perhaps the same can be said for your situation.

4

I asked my Daddy pointed questions. Safe subjects.

Like:

Do you remember your first day at school?

What was you favorite food?

Your first love interest?

First time you drove?

They seem benign but lead to other questions and answers.

Be careful, my Daddy often flipped the script and started asking me stuff.

Really tho’ the only way to get to know him is to spend loads of time with him.

I can’t say if you have time to do this, but you can say you tried.

5

I have a kind of lateral suggestion. Are the any social organizations around that have a lot of Chinese immigrants around his age? By getting to know other people of his generation, from the same place, you’ll be a lot better able to contextualize him, and maybe be able to practice some techniques for communicating without the emotional baggage getting in the way.

If you volunteer for a bit, telling everyone why you’re there, it might be helpful. I realize you don’t have all the time in the world (either personally or with your dad), but it might be worth it.

Also: someone in their 80s isn’t going to visit you. You’ll need to visit him. He’ll have more energy and willingness to spend time with you if he can be in familiar spaces.

6

I can relate to much of your relationship with your father, except for the age difference it mirrors my own. But I was able to visit him once a year for a week or so, as we lived only 600 miles apart. Also we didn’t have the cultural/language issues going on that you do.

My father was willing, later in life, to talk about his early life experiences, including growing up poor in the depression, being in the army for a year before WWII, and then going into the Merchant Marine during the war. He even told me about a brief earlier marriage, that produced a child who died as an infant, and that then ended in divorce, all during the war. Knowing these experiences and reading somewhat between the lines helped me to understand him better, and feel less hostile than I had. Also I was in therapy myself for 2 years at about age 40, which helped me a lot to regard both my parents as people not villains. Even though our relationship never became warm or close, I felt some closure with our lives together when he died. I’m not sure if that tracks with your goals here, but if there is a way for you to open more communication channels for him that are, perforce, not in person, it could help you to understand him better. You can’t count on him working to understand you better, but even a one-way street is better than a wall.

7

My father and I were not that close. As an adult, whenever I called and he picked-up the phone, he’d immediately call for my mother and do a quick hand-off. After my mother died, I tried what you are asking about here - our relationship was pretty much the same. It was just not possible to get “close” to him. I would ask him about stuff, and he would just reminisce about the good old days, often with regret. TBH, those were not really all that healthy discussions, at least for me, and probably for him, too.

I know we may feel obligated to maintain relationships with family members, but ask yourself why this is important. You appear to have a successful life with warm relationships with others (including non-family members) and are comfortable with your decisions and direction. You’ve managed things just fine without your father. What do you hope to gain from this endeavor? Why does this relationship need to be more than it is?

8

If you’re trying to find out more about him and his life, a great place is to start with old family photo albums. Get an album, or photos, as old as you can find. Then ask him about the stories of his family - ask who is in the picture, how did they know each other, what were they doing, etc. Sometimes you can find out good information this way, and have a place to start other conversations. “I didn’t know you visited the statue of liberty when you were 7?” “Is this you with John Wayne?”

9

Some men are simply loners. When my mother died I made several attempts at trying to befriend my Dad.(a taciturn German) After one of these attempts he simply said in so many words. “I am your father and you are my son. I set the rules and what exists is what we have”.

He wanted to be aloof and did not require my friendship. I accepted that and we continued on as a sort of neighborly buddies on a very much “surface level” only for the last 8 years of his life. You must not blame yourself.

10

My sister and my father were not that close - I think their personalities were so alike that if they didn’t agree on everything, they couldn’t agree on anything. But when my father died, my sister gave a heartfelt eulogy about all the things she learned from him - honesty, fairness, compassion, family, etc. Maybe instead of focusing on how different you are, you should start with your similarities and find some common ground to work from.

11

Long story short, if you want to get to know him better, then you need to make the effort. Not sayin’ that’s “fair” or “right”, but just is. Totally honest question: “Would you rather make an effort now or go to his memorial?”

For context, he was born around 1940-ish. China in general and he as an individual has gone through an enormous amount of challenges since then. You were born 1980-ish, so there is a huge generational, cultural, lived experience and perhaps language gap to account for and/or overcome. [Trying to be helpful here and absolutely no blame game, but there are a lot of challenges to just “an age” difference.]

Second, dig into the cultural aspects (apologies in advance if this seems condescending or inappropriate). Where is he from in China? How long has he been in the US? Do you speak Mandarin? Do you speak his dialect? When did he come to the US? Is your mother from China (or Chinese or a Mandarin speaker or father’s dialect speaker)? Did you grow up in a largely American Chinese culture? Family ties back to the village or old country? Have you ever been to his home village? These are all important to finding a common ground.

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Did he ever cook when you were going up? Did you have favorite recipes of his?

One of the smartest things I ever did was ask my grandfather for three of his recipes the last time I saw him before he died.

13

That’s a good point. I don’t need to try to change him, just meet him where he’s at, and try to find common ground on his turf. It’s easier for me to learn mahjong than for him to try to open up and suddenly become someone completely different.

Maybe there’s a path — however long and arduous — from “oh, poor me, I lost another $5 to your elite mahjong skills, dad!” to “wow, son, I wish we got to spend more time together!” At least that’s something he’d enjoy, and unlikely to get angry about. Unless I win :wink:

And I’ll try to throw out casual random questions during the game, though he might be like, “Shut up, son, I’m trying to concentrate.” Worth a shot!

I don’t think there’s some grand plan or elaborate rationale behind all this. He’s just my dad, and he’s getting old, and I’d like to try to improve the remaining years of our relationship so it ends on a good note.

It doesn’t feel like an obligation per se — I’m culturally too Americanized to truly express (or feel) filial piety — but this is just someone I would like to try to get closer to. Unlike him, I guess I’m just more personable and interested in people, and he’s one of the few that I’ve never been able to “break through” to. That’s all.

He’s a good man in his own, difficult way. He’s always loved me, though he was usually unable to express it in a way I could understand or accept. Giving (things or money) is his preferred love language, but well… I already have all the material goods that I really need, and have to continually decline his attempts to give me more. We had an argument about his will a few months ago, but not in your typical way. He wanted to leave me too much of an inheritance, and I was trying to convince him to either splurge on some late-life luxury travel with his wife instead, or to leave more to my half-sister’s kids, and that what I would really like instead is just for us to spend more quality time together.

He was completely disinterested in that, and I think may have been insulted by my suggestions; in his mind, he worked hard to fulfill his fatherly duties, and it hurt his pride to imagine that he’d leave his son in any condition but “prosperous” after his passing. (“What kind of father would that make me?" You don’t know what’s good for you. I don’t trust you to handle your life. I’m going to leave you this money and you’re going to appreciate it someday when you’re older and wiser.”) OK. I acquiesced, tired of arguing with him, and it’s his money anyway. Again, not a right or wrong thing here — just different values and communication styles that make it hard for us to discuss topics of substance.

I don’t think so =/ I’m one of like three (maybe 4 now) Asian people I’ve ever seen in my small town in Oregon. It’s not like San Francisco.

Good point. I’ll try to make more of an effort to do that, though it’s hard when I have limited funds and paid time off, and he lives a 14-hour flight away.

Yeah, exactly. This is a part of his life that I don’t really understand. This must have been during or right after the Chinese Civil War, when Mao took over and the nationalists fled to Taiwan, but I don’t know what his family’s circumstances were. Were they fleeing the country as refugees? Were they anti-communist? How did he end up in the USA and become a student, businessman, and capitalist? How did he then end up in Taiwan and how did he meet my mom? I should know these basic facts about his life, but I really don’t. I’ve tried to ask about it, but he seemed reticent, or maybe I failed to properly phrase the question. I’ll try again next time.

We don’t really have family photo albums. My understanding is that our genealogy basically ends at my grandpa (his father), and before that, things were lost to history (literally, as in the civil war uprooted so many families and destroyed so many records we have no idea who our ancestors were). He doesn’t even know his own birthday, because no official record of his birth exists anymore. When he immigrated, the Americans made one up for him. (“Sometime in the 40s. How does November sound?”)

Not condescending at all, and as you surmised, it’s part of the difficulty in our relationship.

Me, I’m one of those second-generation Americans that don’t really have strong cultural ties to the “homeland”, such as it were. By the time I was born, he had already finished university in the US, was employed by a US company, but lived and worked in Taiwan as an American expat. So I ever only knew him (by that point) as Taiwanese-American, and whatever ancestral longing he may have felt (or not) towards China was never expressed to me. The whole Taiwan-China thing was not (yet) at a boiling point back then. Different members of our extended family had different ideas about it (whether re-unification with China proper was a good, bad, or neutral thing), but at the time it just wasn’t a big deal and not the cause of any family drama that I knew of.

My mother is Taiwanese by birth and by citizenship. They met there and had me, and I was born American by birthright (jus sanguinis). I grew up in Taiwan, lived there until I was 18, but went to an American school there for the majority of my childhood. Their native tongue is Mandarin, which I also speak (to about a middle-school level), but English soon took over and that is now my “primary” language, even though it wasn’t my mother tongue. There’s a lot of code-switching in our conversations, where we each know about 80% of each other’s words, but there are occasionally certain words or concepts that we have to try to translate for one another. (Thank you, ChatGPT.)

We’ve all visited China together as tourists, but it didn’t seem to me that he cared too much about any particular region of it. It may be the case that he’s one of those extremely proud first-gen American immigrants that tried very hard to assimilate and deliberately downplayed his ancestry and previous cultural heritage. As far as I could tell, he was quite proud of his newfound American-ness, especially since he considers himself a success story of the American Dream. I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that he considers it a positive that he fled from Mao’s China to find success as an American capitalist, even though he was only ever here for a few years for university, and has lived in Taiwan ever since. Fresh off the boat, America must have been quite the eye-opening economic miracle and bootstrap story for him.

The questions of nationality and culture for us (he, my mother, and myself) are not sensitive, but complicated. We were all the products of a region and era in great upheaval, between Taiwan, the PRC (China), Japan, and the US. My father left a young communist nation and became a rugged individualist by way of the US, and is thus somewhat of an (American) patriot. My mother’s family grew up under Japanese colonialism (the “good kind”, as Taiwan was a model colony for the budding Japanese Empire at that point), so she’s more fond of Japanese culture than either American or Taiwanese. Me, I grew up in an American bubble in Taiwan, more Scooby-Doo than Confucius.

Suffice to say we’re all sorts of culturally confused… none of us fully shared a culture, despite having been a family. We don’t even like the same foods.

But still, you’re right. It’s worth digging. Even if he doesn’t feel particularly sentimental about his home village, at least knowing his journey from there to the US and Taiwan would help me place his life in its historical and cultural context, and from there I might be able to guess at the personal context, even if he himself isn’t willing or able to share.

Never. Not a single time. I don’t think he even knows how to turn on the stove. He was very much hands-off of everything. He didn’t cook, he didn’t know how to do the laundry, he didn’t know how to change a lightbulb, change a clock battery, reset the VCR timer… he never tinkered with anything or built anything with his hands.

He’s not a dumb man. He has a master’s from Columbia and worked as a nuclear engineer. I think he just considered “domestic” things beneath him and never bothered to do any of that. My understanding is that some part of his family may have been upper-class merchants before Mao (but I’m not really sure of the details there).

He’s also weird about food. He has an obsession with low-quality American breakfast food, specifically hotel waffles and Denny’s. I thought about getting him a waffle maker and teaching him to make them as a fun activity (dad, it’s just some mix, water, and heat… go on, you can do it…) to which I suspect he’d just get his wife to go to the store to buy some premade waffles instead.

Huh. I’m sorry to hear that… that’s a brand of masculinity I’m aware of (through fiction), but not one I’ve personally experienced. It sounds… a bit sad, though I suppose I would have become one of those men if I were raised in such a culture.

My dad isn’t quite like that… more “shy” than “cold”, I think. He can be enthused about technical topics (ask him to explain a nuclear reactor), just not really “people stuff”. You probably know men like that too, and you can break through to them if you “talk shop” enough. (I mean, half the Dope is like that sometimes, just without the cultural and language barriers.)

Well, I don’t feel guilty about it, and I don’t blame myself — I’ve already put in more than my fair share of effort, I think. But it’s also relatively effortless for me, by personality, vs for him. It’s just who I am; I’ve always been drawn to cultures and people and individual stories, and I love finding both common ground and interesting differences with others. The same could not be said for him.

If he dies and this is how our relationship remains till the end (cordial but unfamiliar), that’s OK. It’s not the end of the world. But why not try? I don’t think he’s shutting me out on purpose; we have no ill will towards each other. We’re just very different individuals from completely different worlds. I see it as a “translation” problem (between languages, yes, but also cultures and generations), not a willingness one.

14

Lot of wisdom being shared. I’m here to say that as long as he’s still alive, it’s not too late to get to know him better. You may need to temper your expectations, but anything you do will be more than if you wait until after he’s gone.

I’m a product of Asian immigrants, too - Chinese on one side, Japanese on the other - so I think I can identify with your sitch in many ways. Both my parents prefer(red) to be closed books, but if you craft your queries artfully, they won’t come across as invasive or discomfiting. Start with asking relatively innocuous questions and ramp them up. Or do what worked with my dad: state something as fact that you know in error. Dad wasn’t great at opening up, but he took the bait more often than not and jumped in with ‘corrections’, which offered opportunities to follow up.

15

Hah! Great strategy.

Yes, that was one of my big takeaways from this thread. Wise thoughts. I may not be able to change him, but I can change my attitude towards the situation. Intimacy isn’t the only path to closeness.

Something casual and activity-based, like mahjong with a side of conversational subterfuge, may be the way to go here.

16

I am also the son of Chinese immigrants of roughly the same age. My father passed away about a decade ago. I had a good relationship with him at the end, but that was not always the case and I had to work at having that happen. Even so, I deeply regret not having learned more about his life before he came to the US, which I have no way of learning about at this point. I have no living relatives of that generation on his side of the family.

I think my father was similar in many ways to your father. It took me a very long time to understand that I had to come to him, so to speak, rather than have him come to me. I was trying to get him to behave more like someone raised in America – after all, we were living in the US – rather than trying to understand him through his eyes and the culture and time period he was raised in.

A few things that helped me:

-If he was born in the 1940s in China, the country was ravaged by WWII and then by the Chinese Civil War. It was an extremely chaotic time, and the poverty and suffering was overwhelming in many areas. My parents first fled the Japanese invaders, then fled the Communists. They had many relatives and classmates who were killed during this time. Your father’s early years were very, very different from yours, and those experiences may have shaped him in ways he may not fully understand.

-Traditional Chinese culture has different value emphases than typical American culture. Not better or worse, but it helped me to learn about it so I could understand him better. You grew up in Taiwan, so you may know a great deal about it already, but reading about traditional Chinese culture and values may still be enlightening.

-Part of what may be underlying his wish for you to find a “steady” white-collar job is that my parents experienced enormous racism when they came to the US, even though they lived in the Northeast. They only told me this late in their lives. But that may underlie some of his wish for you to be settled in a job where you seem to be more protected from racism by being a white-collar professional.

-For many of the above reasons, my parents also wanted to give me money all the time. I resisted for many years, but then I just started letting them. Money is a very common Chinese gift, as you may know. When my brother got married to another person of Chinese descent, I think every single relative on both sides gave them a check. None of them used the registry. And you know that’s his love language. So let him do it. He’s trying to show he loves you. Whether or not you need the money is irrelevant, and fussing about it is creating tension. Accept the money because of what it means to him.

Similarly, I would stop trying to convince him to change his will. It’s very important for him to feel like he has provided appropriately for his descendants. That is a higher priority for him than spending his money on himself. You don’t want him to tell you what to do with your will; stop telling him what to do with his.

-It can be very difficult to express complex, abstract thoughts in a language you are not completely fluent in. It may also be harder as he gets older and he is not as sharp as he used to be. When you talk, does he talk in Mandarin?

-I don’t know if he’s always been an interrupter, but some of that may be from hearing loss and mild cognitive decline, both of which would be unsurprising at his age. If it’s always been true, you can try to re-direct him, or you can accept it as a character quirk and let it go. Getting mad about it is just causing tension and not making it better. It sounds like the two of you are jumping at each other within a few minutes of when the call starts, and that dynamic isn’t good for your relationship.

If he’s able to do zoom calls with you where you can see each other, rather than talk on the phone, that might help with the interrupting, and it will also help with the bonding. I think you can ask about his early life, if you don’t know much about it, and see how he responds. I am guessing he will be happy to be spending more time talking with his son.

17

I don’t think it’s ever too late. My Dad was a great guy, and taught me how to fire a rifle, how to fish, and other such things. But there was no doubt that my younger sister was Daddy’s Little Girl. It all worked out; my Mother somehow bonded with me, so there was that.

Then Mom died, and Sis moved to Australia, and there was Dad and me. So we got to know each other without Mom and Sis in the way. Dad was in his 60s and I was in my 30s, and we got to know each other. And I found a most amazing person. “Your Mom never let me tell you this, but …” was typical of the start of Dad’s stories. And those stories! Hitchhiking across Canada. Trying to buy cigarettes in Chicago when he worked on CN passenger rail. Working as a civilian contractor in the Canadian Arctic. Hell, I joined him on a drive to, and across Newfoundland—one of his bucket list items.

One of the most fascinating people I’ve ever known. I miss my Mom, and my sister moved overseas, but in a way, I’m glad—their departures let me get to know my Dad a lot better that I could with them in the way. And I got to know a most amazing guy.

Get to know your Dad. You won’t regret it.

18

Perhaps.

Given how nasty that early life may have been, as his parents lost everything except their lives fleeing the violence and chaos, he may well be stoically walling it all out of his psyche. Or he may welcome your curiousity.

The only way to know is to ask. Whichever way he leans, good bet it’s immutable.

19

This is probably a hijack, but I got on very well with my Dad. He was a bright person who instilled in me a love for learning, reading, science etc. He never had a University education but I would guess that his ability was at least at Masters if not PhD level. But this was pre WWII when only the privilaged went to University. He spent most of his life working as a statistical clerk in an insurance company. Would probably have been a great scientist or engineer if he’d had the opportunity.

I remember happy discussions when we would shoot the breeze about… well, anything.

Thanks Dad for all you taught me. I love and miss you.

20

Those were pretty chaotic times, I think. My unsupported guess is that, out of all the things he did and had to go through, he did one or more things that he is embarrassed or ashamed of, and he just wants to keep all of that behind him.

My Japanese husband’s family is very much like that. His oldest sister married and divorced and was forced to leave behind her daughter. Later she married again, and had a son. To this day that son does not know that he has a half-sister somewhere, because his mother is ashamed and embarrassed to talk about it (I don’t understand it, it’s a cultural thing). Maybe when his mother finally dies, someone will tell him, but I doubt it (unless it’s me). That family is riddled with secrets and denial.