I was watching Interstellar again and I had a serious question.
What happened to Cooper's eldest son Tom?
I mean when we last saw him he came back to the family home after extinguishing the fire and was overwhelmed by Murphy's discovery on how her father was communicating with them. However he or his family aren't referenced being on Cooper Station or the other space station.
According to the Interstellar wiki entry on him:
In the novelization of the film, it is established that when Cooper appears on Cooper Station, Tom had "passed almost two decades ago." (pg. 271)
That is the total amount of knowledge of official knowledge that I have found about him, although you're not the only person who wondered.
As @FuzzyBoots noted in his answer, the film's official novelisation indicates that he died some two decades before, presumably around the 2130's.
He would never see Tom again. His son had passed almost two decades ago, and his son Coop — Cooper’s grandson — was biologically old enough to be his father. Almost everyone he knew was dead — except Murph.
As for Murph — he didn’t know how that was going to go. For him, less than a year had passed since they sat together on her bed. For her, however, it had been a lifetime. He had been gone for most of her life. How did he apologize for that?
Beyond that, there's no indication of how he spent his remaining years; working on his farm or helping his sister to prepare for the departure of the human race.
