"I'll Ask Them Someday"

Someday is an appointment with no date on it.

Everyone has a version of it. I'll ask them over dinner sometime. I'll ask when work calms down. I'll ask when they're in a better mood.

The problem is that someday is not written on any calendar. Nothing reminds you. It just moves, quietly, until one day the person you meant to ask can no longer answer.

It isn't that you don't care

Most people assume that not asking your parents about their past is a failure of interest. Usually it is the opposite.

The closer you are, the harder it gets. There is a fear in it. Asking someone what they were like when they were young can feel like saying out loud that they are old now, that time is short. So you talk about the weather instead, and what's for dinner.

There's a practical reason too. Nobody knows how to ask. "Tell me about your life" is a question no human being can answer. It is too big and too open. A whole life does not fit in one reply.

Start with the smallest possible question

Don't start with their life. Start with one small thing.

What colour was the front door of the flat you grew up in? How much was your first pay packet? What was my father wearing the first time you met him?

Small questions have answers. And one answer pulls the next one out on its own. Twenty minutes in, they will tell you something you have never heard, without you asking for it.

"We earned eighty dollars a month back then. Rent was thirty-five."

That line did not come from asking what life was like back then. It came from asking how much the first pay packet was.

The real deadline

There is no deadline on this, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. No notification arrives telling you that you have two years left.

We do this work not out of pessimism, but because we have met too many people who wanted to ask for the first time at the exact moment it became impossible.

So don't try to do all of it. Ask one question tonight. One is enough.