Don't assume you'll always be able to ask

There's a sentence almost everyone says about their parents' stories: "I should really write those down someday."

Someday is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. It assumes there will be a calmer week, a free weekend, a good moment. And underneath that, it assumes something bigger that we never quite say out loud — that the person will still be there to ask, and still be able to answer, whenever we finally get around to it.

That assumption is the whole problem. Not because anything is necessarily wrong, but because it's an assumption we have no right to make, and we make it constantly.

I know how this goes because I made it myself. My father was around for almost forty years of my life. There was no urgency — there's never urgency, that's the trap — so I never sat him down and really asked. I figured I knew him. Then he was gone, and a few years later my own son asked me what his grandfather was like, and I realized how little I could actually say. The window had been open my entire life. I just kept assuming it always would be.

Here's the thing about that window: it doesn't usually close with a warning. People don't announce the last good conversation. Memory dims gradually, health turns suddenly, and the version of someone who can still tell you the whole story in their own words is available right up until, quietly, it isn't.

I'm not trying to frighten you. I'm trying to move "someday" to "this month." Because the cost of acting early is almost nothing — a slightly inconvenient afternoon — and the cost of acting too late is total and permanent. When the downside is that lopsided, you don't wait for the perfect moment. You take the decent one in front of you.

You will never regret recording your parent's stories a year too early. You may never forgive yourself for being a month too late.

The good news is that the effort that used to make this easy to postpone is mostly gone. You don't have to write a book or schedule a project. With MemoirTalk your parent just talks, and the rest is handled. The only thing left for you to do is the one thing that was always the actual obstacle: not assuming there's still time.

Call them this week. Ask the real questions. Don't save it for a someday you can't promise.

— Jeff

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