Questions to Ask Your Parents Before They Die, and How to Record Them

Almost everyone who loses a parent arrives at the same small, specific regret. Not the big unsaid things. Something ordinary: the name of the street they grew up on, why they left that job, what their own mother was actually like, the story about the car that everybody half remembers and nobody can finish.

These are the questions to ask your parents before they die, grouped so you can start with one tonight rather than scheduling an interview neither of you wants. There is also the part most lists skip: how to bring it up, how to record the answers so you still have their voice in thirty years, and what to do when they say no.

Why These Questions Never Get Asked

Not because families do not care. Because asking feels like an announcement. Sit a parent down with a list and the subtext arrives before the first question does: I think you are running out of time. So the questions wait for a better moment, and the better moment turns out to have been last Tuesday.

The gap is measurable on the practical side of this conversation. In The Conversation Project's 2018 national survey, 92 percent of Americans said talking about their wishes for the end of life was important, and 32 percent had actually done it. Their 2013 survey found much the same split at 27 percent. Nothing forces the story questions at all, so they do worse.

The thing worth knowing before you start: being asked is rarely unwelcome. Most people over seventy have not been asked a real question about their own life in years. They get asked about their health, their grandchildren and their appointments.

How to Bring It Up

Do not open with mortality. Open with a project. StoryCorps understood this when it launched the Great Thanksgiving Listen in 2015: teenagers were asked to record one elder over the holiday weekend, and it worked because it was homework, not a deathbed. The recordings became part of an archive that the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress houses.

You need one sentence. Any of these will do it:

• I want to get some of your stories written down properly while we have time. Can I ask you about growing up?
• The kids are going to ask me about you one day and I will get half of it wrong. Help me get it right.
• I am doing a thing where I record one conversation with you a month. You are allowed to refuse any question.

Three rules about the setting. Not at the holiday table with everyone listening, because an audience turns an answer into a performance. Side by side beats face to face, which is why cars and kitchens and walks work better than living rooms. And one or two questions per sitting, not twenty, so it stays a conversation rather than an interrogation.

Recording the Answers

Write nothing down while they talk. Note taking makes people edit themselves, and in ten years you will want the voice far more than the transcript. Ask plainly: do you mind if I record this, just for us? Almost nobody says no once it is asked out loud.

• Use the voice memo app already on your phone. It is enough.
• Put the phone flat on a cushion or a folded tea towel between you, a hand span from whoever is talking, screen down.
• Turn on airplane mode. One incoming call ends a recording you cannot repeat.
• Say the date, the place and who is speaking in the first ten seconds. In fifteen years nobody remembers which spring this was.
• Copy the file somewhere else the same night. A recording that exists only on a phone is one dropped phone from gone.

Keep the camera out of it. A phone lying flat gets forgotten in about ninety seconds; a lens pointed at somebody never does. If you want the technical detail on file formats, room noise and long term storage, it is in how to record your voice for your family.

Questions About Childhood and the Family You Come From

Start here. These are the safest questions in the list and they warm up everything that follows.

• What is your earliest memory?
• Describe the house you grew up in. Start at the front door and walk me through it.
• What did the kitchen smell like on a Sunday?
• What was your mother like when she was not being a mother?
• What did your father do all day?
• Who in the family had a reputation, and what was it for?
• What were you punished for most often?
• What did you want to be at nine years old?
• What is a story about your grandparents that only you still know?
• What did your family have too little of? Too much of?
• Was there a family argument that changed things? Do you know what it was really about?
• Is there anybody in the family we stopped speaking to? Why?

Questions About Love, Marriage and Friendship

• When did you first know you were in love with Mom or Dad?
• What did you think when you first saw each other?
• Who was in love with you that you did not choose? Do you ever think about it?
• What did the wedding actually cost, and who paid?
• What was the hardest year of the marriage, and what got you through it?
• What do you argue about that you have never resolved?
• Who was your closest friend at twenty five? What happened to them?
• What did you learn about love from your own parents that you had to unlearn?
• What did you do on your best ordinary day together?
• If you had thirty seconds to say one thing to your husband or wife, what would it be?

Questions About Work, Money and the Choices They Made

• What was your first job and what did it pay?
• What work were you proudest of? Did anyone ever say so?
• Was there a job you wanted and did not get? What would have been different?
• When were you most frightened about money?
• What did you have to give up so that we could have something?
• Who helped you when you needed it? Did you ever repay it?
• What decision changed the direction of your whole life? Did you know it at the time?
• What did you believe strongly at thirty that you no longer believe?
• What is something you taught yourself to do that nobody knows about?
• What do you know how to do that I should learn now?

The Harder Questions

Ask these later, one at a time, and hand back an exit with each one: tell me to stop and I will stop. Then leave the silence alone. The silence is where the answer is being decided, and filling it is the most common mistake people make in these conversations.

• What are you most proud of?
• What do you regret?
• Is there anybody you need to forgive, or be forgiven by?
• What was the worst day of your life? Can you tell me?
• What has grief taught you? Who do you still miss most?
• Do you believe anything happens after we die? Has that changed as you got older?
• Are you frightened? Of what, exactly?
• What do you want us to do when the time comes?
• What would you want said about you by somebody who really knew you?
• What do you still want to do?

That second to last one is worth recording carefully. It is the difference between a eulogy written from guesswork and one written from the person themselves, which is most of what makes a eulogy for a mother or father sound like them.

The Questions Only They Can Answer About You

This is the section people are not ready for. Everything above is their life. This is the part of your own life that only they witnessed, and it is unrecoverable in a way the rest is not.

• What was I like at four?
• What was I like as a teenager, honestly?
• What did you worry about with me that I never knew?
• What did I do that you were quietly proud of?
• What did you get wrong with me?
• Who do I remind you of?
• What do you hope for me now?
• What do you want my children to know about you when they are old enough to ask?

That last question is the single most useful thing a phone can record. It gives an older person permission to speak straight past you, to somebody who may not be born yet, and they almost always change register when they do it.

The Practical Questions, Which Are a Separate Conversation

Do not mix these in. Paperwork questions asked inside a story conversation make the story conversation feel like a survey of assets. Book them separately, keep them short, and write the answers down rather than recording them.

• Where do the documents live: will, deeds, insurance, military records?
• Who are your doctor, your lawyer and your accountant?
• What do you want and not want if you are too ill to say?
• Burial or cremation, and have you paid for anything?
• How do we get into your phone and your email if we have to?

Each of those has a proper home. The document list is the when I die file, the ceremony belongs in planning a funeral in advance, the written version of their wishes is a funeral wishes template, and accounts and devices are covered in digital legacy planning.

If You Only Have One Afternoon

Sometimes there is no year of monthly conversations. There is a diagnosis, or a hospital room, and forty minutes of good energy in a day. Ask these eight, in this order, and stop whenever they tire:

• Tell me about your life, the parts you want remembered.
• What are you most proud of?
• What did you learn that you want us to know?
• What do you want to say to each of us by name?
• Is there anything you need to say that you have not said?
• What should we do on your birthday?
• What do you want us to stop worrying about?
• Is there anything you want me to tell anyone?

That shape is borrowed from clinical practice. Dignity therapy, developed by the palliative care psychiatrist Harvey Chochinov, puts a short set of questions like these to seriously ill patients, records the session and edits it into a document the family keeps. In his study of 100 terminally ill patients, 91 percent reported being satisfied with it. Writing rather than talking is covered in letters after a terminal diagnosis.

When They Say No

Some people will not do this, and that is a right rather than a problem to solve. Push once, gently, then stop. What usually works instead is a side door.

• Photographs. Put a shoebox of them on the table and ask nothing. People who will not answer questions will narrate pictures for two hours.
• Objects and food. Cook their mother's recipe with them. Ask about the watch, the medal, the scar.
• A different asker. Parents often tell a grandchild what they will not tell a child. Send a teenager with a phone.
• Dementia. Go backwards, not forwards. Old memories and songs survive longest, and quizzing causes distress. Sit with what comes.
• Estrangement. A question can be posted. So can an answer. If it never comes, the letter you write to them instead is still worth writing, which is the subject of writing a letter to someone who died.

And if they refuse everything, write down what you already know yourself, tonight, in your own words. Half remembered is infinitely better than gone.

Now Answer Them Yourself, Before Anybody Has to Ask

Everything above exists because one generation waited to be asked and the other waited for permission. You can simply skip that. Answer the same questions for your own children now, while it costs you nothing but an evening.

That is what Goodbye App is for. Write letters to the people you choose, or record them in your own voice, and schedule delivery for an exact date up to thirty years ahead, or for after you are gone. They stay private until the moment they arrive, they can be rewritten or deleted at any time before then, and the whole thing is free, in thirteen languages. You can also switch on an inactivity safeguard, a threshold you set between three and forty five days, which releases unsent letters if it is ever reached.

Start with the one your parents could not answer without being asked: what do you want my children to know about you? Say it out loud, address it to them by name, and put a date on it.

Common Questions

How long should one conversation be? Forty minutes is the working limit for most people, and twenty is plenty. Six short conversations beat one long one, because tiredness makes answers shorter and more polite.

Can I record a phone call instead? Yes, and for distant families it is often the only option, but ask permission on the recording itself and get a clear yes from everyone on the call. In many places a call recorded without everybody's agreement is not allowed, and the rules differ from country to country and from state to state, so check what applies where you both are before you start.

What if I start crying? Then they will know it mattered. Crying does not ruin a recording; stopping the recording does. Let it run.

Should I ask about the will? Not in the same conversation. Money questions asked beside memory questions change how the memory questions feel, and older people are more alert to that than their children think.

What do I do with the recordings afterwards? Copy them off the phone the same week, keep three copies in two different places, and tell one other person in the family where they are. A recording nobody knows about is not an archive.

Is it morbid to do this while they are healthy? It is the opposite. Healthy people give better answers, argue with your version of events, and get to enjoy being asked. Almost nobody who does this early regrets it; the regret is entirely on the other side.