Do You Want All the Good That You’ve Done to Be Forgotten?

Someday, someone in your family will try to tell your story. They’ll sit at a table during a holiday or a funeral and try to explain who you were. What you did. Why it mattered.

They won’t be able to.

The things you fought for and the sacrifices you made won’t survive the retelling. They’ll get the broad strokes wrong and mix up the timeline, and decades of your life will flatten into a couple of sentences that could describe anyone.

Not what you did for a living. Not where you were born. Who were you? What did you believe? What did you learn the hard way? What would you want your great-grandchildren to know about the life you lived?

That answer dies with you unless you do something about it, and most people don’t. They mean to and they plan to, and then they never get around to it.

I’ve seen both endings, in my own family and with my own clients, and I’m not neutral about this. Leaving your story unrecorded is a decision, even when you make it by putting things off, and your family is the one that pays for it. I’d much prefer you make that decision on purpose, with your eyes open, than drift into it one busy month at a time.

The One Who Did It

A client came to me a few years ago wanting to write his memoir. He’d lived a full life and was ready to get his stories down for the family he wanted to leave them to. We sat down, I asked questions, he talked. We worked through the hard parts and the good parts. We shaped it into something real. For more, see the ghostwriter’s role after the manuscript is done.

The book went up on Amazon. It was well received. His family read it. His friends read it. He called me after it was published and said something I hear from almost every memoir client: “I can’t believe I almost didn’t do this.”

He’d knocked out a major bucket list item. More than that, he’d given his family something permanent. His voice, his perspective, his lessons, all captured in a form that would outlast him. His grandchildren will never have to guess who he was.

The One Who Waited

Another client signed a contract with me to write his memoir. He was excited about it. Talked about it with his family. Had stories lined up in his head.

But something always came up. Work got busy. A family obligation took priority. He wanted to wait until things settled down. There was always a reason to push it back another month.

He passed away before we could start.

His story died with him. All those experiences, all that context, all the things only he knew about his own life, gone. One of his children told me afterward that he was heartbroken. He was grieving his father, and he was grieving every question his father could never answer now, the stories nobody else could tell and the details that vanished the moment his father did.

I still think about that contract. He was busy, the way everybody is busy. The trap is believing a better month to start is coming, and for him it never came.

That family will spend the rest of their lives wondering. They miss him, and they miss the chance they had to know him, and that chance isn’t coming back.

The Grandfather Who Left a Journal

My grandfather on my father’s side was a Navy ship’s cook in World War II. He was captured and spent three years and four months as a prisoner of war in Japanese prison camps. The things he endured were brutal and systematic.

After the war, he wrote it down in a journal. Notes, observations, details about what happened to him and the men around him.

Decades later, I used that journal and his notes to write his story. The book is called Behind the Wire, and it’s on Amazon. Because he took the time to record what happened, people can now read about his experience. His grandchildren know what he went through. His great-grandchildren will too.

His courage and his suffering are documented. Nobody can erase what he endured or forget what he survived. His story survives because he made sure it could.

The Grandfather Who Left Nothing

My other grandfather, on my mother’s side, was also in World War II. Family rumor says he was a hero. The kind of stories you’d want to tell your kids and their kids after them.

But he left no journal. No notes. No recordings. Nothing except his service record.

I wanted to write his story. I couldn’t. There was nothing to work with. No details, no context, no personal account of what he did or saw or survived. Whatever he accomplished is gone. Whatever courage he showed is unrecorded. Whatever sacrifices he made are forgotten.

His grandchildren will never know what happened. His great-grandchildren won’t even know the rumors. A man who may have been a genuine war hero has been reduced to a name and a set of dates. That’s all that’s left of him.

Two grandfathers fought in the same war. One left a record, and his story survives. The other left a service record and a family rumor, and I’ll never be able to write the book he deserved.

What Separates the People Who Write Their Memoir?

These four stories share the same lesson.

The client who wrote his memoir has a book his family will read for generations.

The client who waited left his family with unanswered questions they’ll carry for the rest of their lives. My grandfather who journaled gave me the raw material to preserve his story. My grandfather who didn’t took his story to the grave.

The difference was never about having an interesting enough life. All four of these men had stories their families needed. The difference was whether they got it down while they still could.

I get impatient with the idea that a life has to be special to deserve a book. The two men in this piece whose stories vanished had plenty to tell, and they lost it because nobody got it on paper in time.

Your Move

Right now, you know who you are. You know what you’ve accomplished. You know the stories that matter and the lessons that cost you something to learn.

Your family doesn’t. Not really. They know pieces. Fragments. The version of you they see at dinner or on holidays. They don’t know the full story, and they won’t unless you tell it.

And if you don’t tell it, nobody will. You’ll become a name on a family tree. A face in a photo nobody can quite place. Everything you built, everything you survived, everything you learned, reduced to a couple of lines in an obituary that doesn’t begin to capture who you were.

You don’t need to write a word. You don’t need a journal or an outline. You just need to start talking before the window closes. I work with memoir clients in their nineties fairly often, so if you’re worried you’ve left it too late, you probably haven’t. Every month you keep putting it off is a month of detail you won’t get back.

It will close. I’ve already seen one family lose that chance after the contract was signed, and I don’t want yours sitting at a holiday table someday trying to guess who you were.

If you’re ready to stop thinking about it and start doing it, book a consultation and let’s talk about your story.

People Also Ask

From the author

Behind the Wire
Behind the Wire is the true story of my grandfather, Frank Hoeffer II, as a prisoner of war, built from the journal he wrote after the war. It shows what a family keeps when somebody writes it down.