About Conversations You'll Wish You'd Had

Your father is sixty-two. He comes over on Sundays, sits in the chair by the window, reads the paper. You think there is nothing left to ask. You have known him your whole life.

You do not know him. You know the man who shows up. You do not know what he was afraid of at your age. What he thought his life would be. What he carries that he has never said.

You do not ask. You assume there will be time.

There is not time. He dies on a Thursday and you never asked him anything that mattered. Your mother lives longer, but something else happens. She starts to forget. The window closes while you watch. The questions you should have asked become impossible to ask, not because she is gone but because she is somewhere you cannot reach.

Ask them now. Before they die. Before they forget. Before they exist but disappear.

I am telling you this because I sit in the chair by the window now.

And some days it takes me a while to remember the names of my children.

I do not tell them this. What would I say? I sit there and I search for the word, the name, the thing I have known for forty years, and it is not there, and then it is, and I say it like nothing happened. But something happened. Something is happening.

The window is closing on me now. I feel it. Not every day. But enough days. A word I reach for and cannot find. A face I know but cannot place. A moment where I am not sure where I am or how I got there. It passes. It always passes. But it takes longer to pass than it used to.

I want to tell them everything. I want to tell Sarah about her mother, what she was like when we met, how afraid I was the day Sarah was born. I want to tell the grandchildren about their grandmother, about my parents, about the life that existed before they did. I want to put it all into words while I still have words.

But they do not ask. And I do not know how to begin without being asked. So I sit in the chair and wait. And some days I cannot remember why I am waiting, and then I remember, and then I am afraid.

Do you understand what I am telling you?

Ask them now. Your father, your mother, your grandparents if they are still here. Ask them before they die. Ask them before they forget. Ask them while the window is open, because you cannot see it closing, but it is.

And it is not just them.

David. I should have told David what his friendship meant. I kept meaning to bring that bottle of wine. He died and I never brought it. The flowers I forgot. The calls I did not make. The things I meant to say and did not say because I thought there would be time.

Tell your children now. Do not wait to be asked. The right moment does not come. You have to make it. Tell them who you were. Tell them what you regret. Tell them the things you understand now. Put the words into the world while the words are still there.

One day you will sit in the chair by the window. Your children will be busy. They will not ask. You will have things to say and no one to say them to. And some days you will search for their names, and the names will not come, and you will sit there with everything you meant to tell them locked inside a mind that is starting to let things go.

I am writing letters because I did not have conversations. I am writing them now because I do not know how much longer I will be able to write.

The window is open. For them. For you. For me, still, today, a little longer.

It does not stay open.