StoryCorps publishes its Great Questions list free after two decades of recorded conversations. Which ones open a person up, which ones get platitudes, and how few you need.
Apple, Google and Facebook each publish a route into a dead person's account. Each runs on legal documents, each gets you less than the advance option, and two common first steps are irreversible.
The Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress has been collecting veterans' firsthand stories since 2000. The bar is one 30-minute interview, 20 manuscript pages, or 10 original letters or photographs — and the interviewer can be anyone.
A printed obituary runs about 300 words. An American life runs about 28,000 days. What the notice is for, and what deserves a page of its own.
9 questions palliative psychiatry uses to help a person tell their life, and a 5-question version for the kitchen table.
The person is still here — which feels like the reason to wait, and is the reason to start. A practical guide to gathering a life story while it can still be told in their own voice.
Almost everything we lose about a person, we meant to keep. The quiet, well-timed act of writing it down is the difference between a life remembered and one merely mourned.
An obituary holds the dates. A life story holds everything there was never room to print — gathered while it can still be told.
A life story — gathered with care, kept for the people who will read it again.
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