A few years before my dad passed away, I started noticing little things.
Nothing dramatic. Just enough to remind me that our parents don’t stay the same forever.
My friend Scott is a photographer and filmmaker. He had created a beautiful tribute to his own father, and after watching it, I realized something.
Everyone has stories.
The problem is we usually don’t ask for them until it’s too late.
I asked Mom and Dad if they’d be willing to sit down for an interview. I wanted to capture their memories while they could still tell them. They both loved the idea.
I spent several days putting together a list of questions.
What was it like growing up?
How did they meet?
What was it like raising three boys on a farm?
What were the happiest years?
The hardest?
The list wasn’t really a script. It was simply there to get them thinking.
When the cameras started rolling, I abandoned it almost immediately.
Knowing the questions let me follow wherever the conversation naturally wanted to go. That’s always been easier for me than sticking to a script.
For nearly four hours they talked.
They told stories about growing up.
About getting married young.
About making ends meet when money was tight.
About life on the farm.
About surgeries, adventures, and raising three boys who couldn’t have been more different from one another.
They answered every question in incredible detail.
I learned things I’d never heard before.
Some stories made me laugh.
Others made me wonder why I’d waited so long to ask.
Near the end of the interview, I asked one question I almost skipped.
“If you could change anything about your lives, what would it be?”
Neither of them hesitated.
They both wished they had spent more time with us boys.
…
I remember sitting there, not really knowing how to respond.
As the oldest, that wasn’t how I remembered my childhood at all.
I was with Mom and Dad constantly.
I rode in the combine with Dad for hours.
I tagged along with Mom in the grain truck.
Every spring we went mushroom hunting together.
They were at nearly every sporting event I ever played.
They somehow found ways to take us on vacations even when there wasn’t much money to spare.
Dad taught me how to fix things because on a farm, if something broke, you figured it out.
Cars.
Fences.
Decks.
Whatever needed repairing.
When Mom wasn’t home, Dad taught us how to survive on what he proudly called milk toast. Looking back, it wasn’t exactly gourmet cooking, but someday I was going to have to feed myself.
One story I’d never heard was about a calf stranded on a small island during a winter flood. Dad waded through freezing, neck-deep water to bring it safely back to shore.
Mom taught us different lessons.
She taught us to read.
To express ourselves.
To balance a checkbook.
(I wasn’t exactly her star pupil on that one for quite a while.)
Between them they taught us how to work, solve problems, laugh at ourselves, and keep going when life didn’t cooperate.
Listening to them that day, I realized something I hadn’t understood before.
Children remember love differently than parents do.
I remembered all the moments they were there.
They remembered all the moments they wished they could have been there even more.
Years later, while Dad was going through chemotherapy, he said something remarkably similar.
If he could do it all over again, he’d spend more time with his family.
Funny how the people who give us the most often remember only what they couldn’t give.
When the interview was over, Scott handed me the hard drive.
I copied everything to my computer and imported it into Final Cut Pro so I could begin editing.
I thought importing the footage meant it had been safely backed up.
I was wrong.
About two weeks later the hard drive failed.
Everything was gone.
Four hours of stories.
Four hours of laughter.
Four hours of memories that could never be recreated.
I took the drive to a professional data recovery company hoping they could perform some kind of miracle.
They couldn’t.
Scott searched for another copy but didn’t find one.
He still has boxes of old hard drives in storage and every once in a while he’ll tell me he hasn’t given up looking.
Neither have I.
Maybe someday one of those old drives will spin to life and those four hours will come back.
I hope so.
But if they never do, I’m still grateful we had that afternoon.
Most families never stop long enough to ask the questions.
I did.
For four uninterrupted hours, I got to hear my parents tell the story of their lives in their own words.
The recording is gone.
The conversation isn’t.
I can still hear Dad laughing.
I can still picture Mom telling stories I’d never heard before.
I can still see the look on their faces after I asked what they would change.
No hard drive can erase that.
If the people you love are still here, ask them the questions.
Not tomorrow.
Not someday.
Today.
Because one day their stories may become more valuable than anything they leave behind.
If this resonated with you, you’re not alone.
