Listen for the Family Stories Told in July

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There is something about July holidays that slows people down long enough to actually be together. The cousins fly in, and pile into the grandparent’s house that feels too small and exactly right all at the same time, and somewhere around the second or third night, someone starts telling a story nobody’s heard quite that way before.

I think of a family I worked with once who returned to the same small town in Montana every July for a week scheduled around the local rodeo. The family consists of three, sometimes four generations under one roof, great-uncles and step-family and grandchildren all present together, thirty-plus years running. But honestly, the setting is almost beside the point. I have heard the same tradition from other families who gather around a campfire at a lodge in the Rockies, and from a family who spends every summer together staying on a vineyard in Italy. Different backdrop, same pull. When people who love each other are finally in one place, at the same time, for long enough, the stories start being shared. Nobody has to ask twice.

That instinct is older than any of us, and it doesn’t need a big occasion to show up. It just needs time, proximity, and someone willing to listen. Long before anyone had a phone to record with, families told each other who they were by telling each other what events happened in their life. Who left home at seventeen and never looked back. Who married against everyone’s advice. Who almost didn’t make it through a hard winter, and did. That is how a family knows its lore. Not through documents, but through stories, told from one generation to the next as something to be cherished.

So if this month finds you back at whatever your family’s version of the rodeo is… a lake, a cabin, a kitchen table that’s hosted forty years of the same people, this might be the year you finally ask. You don’t need a plan, and you certainly don’t need a microphone. You just need one honest question and the patience to let the answer be told. Ask your grandfather what he remembers about the winter before he met your grandmother. Ask your step-mother what she was most afraid of at twenty-five. Ask about the thing nobody in the family quite talks about, gently, and see what unfolds.

I think that can be an important gift tucked inside all of July’s noise. The long drives, the crowded porches, the relative who tells the same joke every year and somehow it’s still funny. Underneath all that is one more chance for the people who hold your family’s history to pass a little more of it on to you, while they’re still here to do the passing.

I will be carrying all of this with me to Mindvalley University in Tallinn, Estonia this month, where I am scheduled to give a talk on Legacy Preservation — on what it actually means to make sure the people we love are remembered for who they are. My work has always been built around one concept: that a life’s legacy deserves to be preserved in the actual words and voice of the person who lived it.

Wherever July family holidays take you this year, enjoy your time with loved ones and ask the questions. Pause, then let them tell you. Listen for the wisdom, and please try to record it.

P.S.  Please come find us on Instagram. We’re sharing more of these stories all summer long.

@legacypreserver on Instagram

What You Don’t Know About Your Father (Until You Ask)

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There is a story from my early years producing memoirs that has remained with me for over two decades. It comes from a family I had the privilege of working with — a man in his eighties, a quiet patriarch who had built something remarkable over the course of a long and disciplined life. Before we ended our filming sessions, his daughter pulled me aside and asked if I could find a way to ask her father something the family had wondered about for years but had never felt they could raise directly.

Every year, the family foundation donated significantly to juvenile diabetes research. No one in the family had the disease. No one could account for it. They had simply been writing the checks, year after year, without ever knowing why.

So in the natural course of our conversation, I asked him.

This man — stoic as they come — began blinking back tears. When he was one year old, his three-year-old brother had died from juvenile diabetes. His mother never recovered, and died from heart problems when he  was 17. His aunts informed him that his mother never got over this loss and ultimately died of “a broken heart”.  From the time he started working at eighteen, he had quietly vowed to give a portion of everything he earned to fight the disease that had taken his brother and destroyed his mother. He had done this, without a word of explanation, for decades.

His children had been sitting on the family  foundation board their entire adult lives, signing  checks for a cause they thought had nothing to do with them — never knowing it was the most personal act of love their father had ever made.

That is what happens when you finally ask.

Our fathers carry entire worlds inside them that they will simply never volunteer. Not because they are withholding — but because it doesn’t occur to them that we want to know. They are men of their generation, or of their temperament, and they move forward. They don’t look back unless someone invites them to.

This Father’s Day, I want to offer you a different kind of gift idea — not something you buy, but something you create together. Sit down with your father, press record on your phone, and ask him something you’ve never thought to ask before. Not “what’s your favorite memory of me” — but the deeper questions. The ones about him.

Some of my favorites to get you started:

  • What’s something you’ve never told me about your own father?
  • What’s a decision you made that changed the entire direction of your life — that I don’t know about?
  • What did you quietly sacrifice that you never mentioned to anyone?
  • Is there something you did — or didn’t do — that you hope I’ll understand someday?
  • What do you know now that you wish you had known at my age?

You may be surprised — even stunned — by what surfaces. The story behind a charitable cause. A dream quietly set aside. A regret that shaped everything without anyone ever knowing it. A love story you were never told.

I did this with my own father over twenty years ago. He is gone now, and I miss him every single day. But I have his voice. I have his stories. I have the things he told me that he had never told anyone — because I asked.

That recording is one of the most precious things I own in this world.

Your father’s stories are still there, waiting. This Father’s Day, go find them.

Happy Father’s Day to all the great Dads out there!