“I’ve had dialogues with my dead mother over the 40 years since she died.” This extraordinary statement comes from Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust, as quoted by New York Times writer Sara Rimer.

I suspect that many older people have conversations with long-dead parents. I certainly do.

Perhaps because I am male, I talk with my father more than my mother. I carry on an inner dialogue with him as I review the past that we shared and speculate about a shared future that his death deprived us of.  

Another motive for this dialogue may also be that, from teenage years on, a certain tension marked my relationship with my father. It’s as if I wish to remedy that situation now, so many decades after that possibility ended.

What does Drew Faust, the newly chosen president of Harvard University, say to her mother? We don’t know but we can speculate.

Some of it almost surely centers on what Faust calls “continued confrontations” with her mother about what it means to be feminine.

Reportedly, her mother brought her up to be an old-fashioned southern woman. She expected her daughter to observe the hard-and-fast social guidelines of the traditional Virginia society in which the family lived.

That meant “a community of rigid social segregation” as Faust herself describes it. Not only were racial divisions kept strictly, but so were those between rich and poor. In that setting, horseback riding for the privileged classes loomed as much more important than efforts to reduce the distance between groups of people.

A friend of Drew Faust has observed that she was brought up to become the wife of a rich man. This kind of social destination now seems at a far remove from her call to become president of a great university.

Presumably, her new job has now taken its place among the topics that Faust talks about with her mother. The latter, four decades dead, would have been astonished at the way her daughter’s life has evolved. Step by step, the hoped-for southern belle has been transformed into one of the foremost educational leaders of America.

With my own father, I review aspects of his career that I failed to ask him about when he was alive. When in 1939, as a reporter for The Boston Post, he sailed to Rome and covered the election of Eugenio Pacelli as Pope Pius XII, did he have any inkling of how the war in Europe would confront the new pope with agonizing decisions?

What most influenced my father, I can now ask, in moving from a fairly mainline position to the political right?  I cannot forget that one of the floral arrangements sent at his death came from Senator Joseph McCarthy. However, I like to think that my father would have turned against the Wisconsin senator after more information about his duplicitous tactics was exposed.

Most of all, I now think about the adolescent rifts that I provoked, spoiling the close relationship we had in my earlier boyhood. One of my deepest regrets connected with my father’s early death, (he was only 56) has been the lost opportunity to repair the distancing that had occurred as I moved into my teenage years.

Moving to safer ground, I wonder what he would think about the decades from 1930 to the middle 1950s. He observed social change from up close because he had to write and speak about it. In his newspaper columns, in weekly television appearances on a current-affairs program, and in talks he gave to various groups, he had reason to analyze the shifting currents of life in America.

My father would probably not be surprised at some of the changes in Boston society and elsewhere. I remember him telling me at the end of World War II that our national life could be expected to change radically. Apparently he foresaw the burst of post-war prosperity and what that would do for America.

Many years later, I discovered that he had predicted to my mother that I would eventually leave my first career, that of being a Jesuit. Apparently, he saw more clearly than I did some aspects of my character that would eventually make me opt for that radical change. He may have known me better than I knew myself.

For my father and my mother, too, I feel greater sympathy than I ever could when younger. This change strikes me as typical of us as we grow older, encountering more and more of the challenges that our parents must have faced.

To their problems we, in our maturity, can now bring much greater understanding than formerly. This provides further material for the inner dialogue by which we continue spiritual contact with them.

Maintaining and cherishing spiritual bonds with our parents, even long after their death, becomes an important part of our character. It enhances our inner life, quite possible making of our later years a richer experience.

Richard Griffin