Avoid things left unsaid
When I tell people that I interview seniors and ghostwrite their life stories as private autobiographies, I get some common responses. The most frequent one is how they wish they had asked their parents questions about their lives when they had the chance. For many adult children in midlife, this opportunity is gone faster than they imagine, and it’s gone forever.
Regret is a hard thing to deal with at any stage of life, but especially later in life. Sometimes when we’re younger, we don’t ask our parents things about themselves because we’re not interested. We were too busy living our lives and focusing on ourselves to care what our parents did before we were born. Once we get a few decades under our belt and become parents ourselves, everything changes. Overnight, we begin to see our parents in a different light. Some of the things they said and did, which we didn’t understand or appreciate in our younger years, now make sense. If we’ve held grudges against our parents, we often forgive them and gain closure.
I’ve only had one parent for the last thirty years, and I’ve ever known him as “Dad”; but he had a life before he assumed this title and role. When I reached an age where I wanted to know—in fact, needed to know— about his younger days, I asked him. Some of his answers surprised me, even shocked me. Other answers comforted me, and some truths have been hard to hear and live with. But, overall, I will have no regrets about things left unsaid, and neither will he.
Parents in their senior years hold the keys to insight and healing for their children. Yet, oftentimes, they don’t know how to package any of this into a conversation they can pass on to them. On the other side, their adult children don’t know how to ask. To add further complexity into the mix, close families are fearful of upsetting each other, and seniors may consider their pasts to be unimportant to their kids. These unfounded fears and assumptions become missed opportunities for bonding, healing, and laughing over shared life legacy stories.
The value that seniors can offer current and future generations—just by sharing their life stories—is immeasurable. Seniors gain meaning and purpose in reviewing their lives, and their adult children can understand and fully appreciate the broader dimensions of the people who raised them.
The truth is that most adult children have no idea who their parents are, and never will unless they share their legacy in some way, such as through life story writing. I’ll give you an example.
When I interviewed 93-year-old Ron Douglas in 2018, he was one of the last known survivors of a sunken British warship during WW2. He was 18 years old on board HMS Spartan, off the coast of Italy, when his ship was torpedoed by German planes and sank. During his enlistment in the Navy, he didn’t mention that he couldn’t swim. That secret nearly cost him his life as he was clinging to a flotation device in freezing water and huge waves while planes continued to fire bullets at him.
Ron survived and lived almost eight more decades without telling his wife or children about his experience that day. All they knew was that he served in the Navy during the war. I wrote his story as a published feature article in a national newspaper, and his adult children have this framed on their wall. You can read the full published story here in the Daily Mirror.
You don’t need to be famous to write your life story. The most powerful stories come from everyday people—stories of love, loss, growth, and discovery. Your story is your family’s treasure and your gift to the world. Capture and preserve it with a ghostwritten life story book in your voice with your name on the cover.
You don’t have to write a word. Just talk about your life!
