What Every Adult Child Wishes They Had Asked Their Parents

The survey was simple. We asked hundreds of people who had lost a parent in the previous five years a single question: if you could ask your parent one question that you never asked while they were alive, what would it be?

The answers were not what we expected. We anticipated questions about the practical — estate matters, family secrets, the location of documents. Instead, almost every response was personal, emotional, and specific in ways that revealed the particular texture of loss.

I would ask what he was most afraid of, and whether it ever went away.

I would ask her what she actually thought of my father, not the party line, but what she really thought about her marriage.

I would ask what he believed happened after we died, and whether he was scared.

I would ask her to describe the day she had me — the actual day, the details, what she felt when she held me for the first time.

I would ask what he was proudest of — not what the family was proud of, but what he was proudest of that had nothing to do with us.

I would ask her who she would have been if she hadn't had children, if she'd had the chance to find out.

These questions have something in common: they treat the parent as a full person — not just as a parent, but as a human being who had an interior life, fears, private opinions, unlived possibilities. They are questions about the person behind the role. And they are almost universally unasked until it is too late to ask them.

Ask them. Not the sanitized versions. The real ones. The ones that might make both of you uncomfortable, because the discomfort lasts a moment and the answer lasts forever.