When my father died, a new relationship was born. I could drop all my defenses, peel away the scrim of resentment and anger that prevented me from knowing and seeing him clearly, and form an honest perspective of our relationship. How sad it is that so many of us seems to know and appreciate our fathers better in death than in life.

Most of us have a moment after reaching middle age when we know our fathers not just as fathers but as fellow men. Our own teenage resentments that linger so long suddenly give way to a sense that we've seen and done a lot of the same things as our fathers. They are old, but not so old. We are younger, but not so young. If we don't understand each other's circumstances. And there's also this: we actually knew our fathers when they were the age we are now. Maybe we were just kids, but we can remember glimpses of how they looked, how they acted, who they knew. No measure of memory, however, will take us back to the time when our fathers were teenagers full of dreams and fears, juiced up on testosterone, trembling at the prospect of a first kiss, feeling their way through to a future that was all expection and no accomplishment. To reach them there requires an act of the imagination or, perhaps, of the spirits.

-Christopher Dickey The Family Album and Sarah B Breathnach