His Father Still A Parenting Memoir [Paperback]

Reid Hollister was a rambunctious, handsome, and sometimes rebellious teenager. While he delighted many friends with humor and antics, he struggled as a student, regularly tested his parents’ patience, and chafed at efforts to guide and discipline him. As he began his senior year in a private high school, Reid suddenly found himself accused of misconduct, which he vehemently denied. Several days later, driving on a highway, Reid died in a one-car crash.

His Father Still:A Parenting Memoiris, first, Reid’s father’s disarmingly candid account of the tumult of parenting Reid through his teenage years, and then confronting the unthinkable obligations of a father to a son after a sudden tragedy. But this book is about much more than parenting and grief. In the months following Reid’s crash, as Tim Hollister worked to steady himself and his family, he found himself consumed by an accelerated need to answer two questions: Had he been a good father? And in raising his son, had he struck the right balance between exposing him to life’s risks while protecting him from life’s dangers?

Answers came in large part from a flood of condolences conveyed through letters and emails, and also in social media posts -- which at the time, 2006, were a brand-new phenomenon. From these messages emerged a mosaic of Reid’s character and personality that was barely known to Tim while Reid was alive because, as parents raise teens by “letting out the tether,” they see less of and know less about their kids. Thus, after Reid’s passing, Tim learned more about his son than he had known while Reid was alive. While this portrait arrived too late, it was not unwelcome; Reid’s crash and its aftermath eventually segued to Tim forging these new insights into the foundation of a renewed relationship with his son that was, if nothing else, a sustainable way forward.

This book is, therefore,lC”