My father was a man who filled every room he walked into. He had a story for everything and an opinion on the rest. Then one morning in his seventy-third year, he had a small stroke — the doctors called it minor, almost nothing, really — and he came home from the hospital quieter.
Not silent. He could still speak. But something in the mechanism had changed. Where before he'd offer a memory unprompted, now he'd start a sentence, lose it halfway through, and wave his hand like he was shooing away a fly.
I sat with him on the porch one evening that summer, watching the light go out of the sky, and I realized I didn't know most of his stories. I'd heard the surface of them — the punch lines, the famous parts — but not the insides. Not what anything had cost him.
I started bringing a notebook. I asked him questions I should have asked twenty years earlier. Some days he'd give me a paragraph. Some days just a sentence. He died the following spring, and what I have is three notebooks, maybe a third of a life.
It's more than nothing. I'm grateful for every word. But I want to tell you: ask the questions now. Don't wait for the quiet to arrive first.