My Father, His Son

The face I had not seen before

At my grandfather’s funeral, I saw my father lower his head and cry quietly. In my memory, it was the first time I had seen him cry. There was no dramatic speech and no loud expression of grief.

What unsettled me was how unfamiliar he looked. He was the same man I had always known, but I had never seen him quite that way.

Someone’s son

All my life, he had been Dad. I knew he had a father, but knowing a family relationship and truly seeing it are different things. As I watched him grieve, I understood that he had lost someone he had once depended on as a child.

For a moment, the role I had given him was not large enough. He was my father, but he was also his father’s son.

Why the lyrics leave room

I did not want the song to explain my grandfather’s life or make my father’s grief more dramatic than I remember it. The scene is quiet because that is how it stayed with me.

What matters is the shift in how a familiar person can be seen. A listener does not need to share my family history to recognize that moment.

What the song adds to the album

The song asks what we fail to see when we know somebody mostly through the role they play in our lives. A parent can become so completely “Dad” or “Mom” that we forget there was a person before us.

Now that I am a parent myself, I wonder whether my children will one day see that part of me too.