One day your kids will want to know who you were

Most of the time, when people think about saving a life story, they think about someone older — a parent, a grandparent, the generation whose stories are visibly at risk. That instinct is right. But it skips over something: the same question is coming for you.

One day your kids, or their kids, are going to want to know who you were. Not your résumé. Not the dates. Who you actually were — what you believed, what you were like at their age, what you were afraid of, what you found funny, how you made the decisions that shaped their lives without their knowing it. They'll want it most at the moments you can't be there: when they're becoming parents themselves, when they're struggling with something you'd have understood, when they just miss you.

And here's the uncomfortable part. You are the only person who can answer that question in your own voice. Everyone else can offer their version of you — fond, partial, secondhand, slowly fading. The first-person account, the real one, exists only as long as you do. After that, it's gone, and your family is left to reconstruct you from other people's memories, the same way I've spent a lifetime trying and failing to reconstruct a mother I lost at four.

We don't record ourselves for a few predictable reasons. It feels self-important — who am I to write a memoir? It feels premature — there's no rush, I'm not going anywhere. And it feels like work — I'm not a writer. All three are understandable, and all three are how the thing never gets done.

But none of them survive much scrutiny. It isn't self-important; your kids aren't asking because you're a big deal, they're asking because you're theirs. It isn't premature; the only version of "too early" you'll ever get is the one that's safe. And it no longer has to be work — that excuse, at least, has finally expired.

That's part of why I built MemoirTalk to need nothing but talking. You don't have to write, and you don't have to decide your life is important enough first. You just talk, here and there, and it becomes a record — something that will be there for your children when you're not, in your own words, sounding like you.

You're going to spend years making sure your parents' stories don't vanish. Spend an afternoon making sure yours don't either. Someone is going to come looking for you. Leave them something to find.

— Jeff

Leave them something to find →