It's a nice answer, and it's an interesting answer, which was really all he was looking for in the first place. Well, alright, he had some personal interest here too.

"That's good of you, not putting your own expectations into the mix. It's hard not to." Or at least it's hard not to put some sort of hope onto the other person. Do better than I did. Don't make the same mistakes. Not that his own mistakes would be easy to replicate, but it's the spirit of the thing.

He smokes quietly for a moment.

"You might misunderstand what I'm about to say." He offers no explanation for that. "But I don't know what I'd do if mine wound up here, especially while he's still young. I'd like to think I taught him better than that, but I guess things happen. Life doesn't play fair. And a universe where he and I end up in the same afterlife, assuming that's what this is, is a very unfair universe."

Without allowing time for the implied insult of that to sink in, he just keeps going. "That's no offense to you and yours, of course. I'm not saying you were bad people, I don't even believe in that. I'm just saying that if there's any justice to anything... well, there probably isn't, is there?" He doesn't exactly believe in that, either.

"All that's to say that you're probably handling this far better than I would."