I know, it can seem a little vain.

“Write a memoir because others will want to read about what an amazing person you have been. You are so important that your life story will be told for generations.”

But this is something that hits particularly close to home.

In the spring of 2017, I thought I still had plenty of time with my grandfather. He used to tell me stories of our German ancestors who immigrated to this country before it was a country — and who fought to make it a free nation during the Revolutionary War. He himself was the walking American Dream, born at the beginning of the Great Depression, working his way to becoming a college football player and later a pathologist. And yet, in March of that year, we lost him — and most of his stories.

I knew, fortunately, he had been spending years writing his autobiography. I was eager to get my hands on it, though admittedly a little saddened to learn that he had only made it to his early twenties — several years before he even met my grandmother. Everything after that point in his life would have to come from secondhand sources.

Still, my grandfather’s writing took me back to a world long before my time, a world that seemed to only exist in movies and history books, a world so disconnected from present day that it’s hard to visualize its true existence. And that’s the world that the man I knew battled through his entire life. Those pages expanded my relationship with him, even after he had departed for Heaven.

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On the other side of my family, I still had both grandparents. But then COVID hit and took my grandmother. The early stages of my grandfather’s dementia then began progressing and, what seemed like instantly, we lost the firsthand accounts of both of my grandparents’ life stories.

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My grandfather-in-law was a storyteller. At every family gathering, he had people circled around him, telling them about his days growing up the third oldest of nine in a small German farming community northwest of Lansing, Michigan. Or about his days playing basketball at Michigan State University. Or about coaching basketball, both at the high school and collegiate levels. Or about his family or his faith — the two most important things in his life.

Then, suddenly in April 2022, we lost him. He had made it to 90. We had every opportunity to capture his life story and we didn’t. He even took steps to do it himself, buying a voice recorder to dictate his story. And still, life got in the way.

Sometimes we are so busy trying to live our lives that we lose them.

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Sadly, these stories are not unique. I know that. Millions of people have their own versions of these tales, of losing loved ones and the regret that fills us — the loving survivors left behind — for not capturing their life stories before it was too late.

But I’m here to offer a reality: when our life stories are over, it’s already too late to write them. We need to write them down before we cross the finish line, even if we’ve rounded the final turn and are headed down the home stretch of life’s race.

And this isn’t a message I am conveying because I offer memoir ghostwriting services. Quite the opposite: this message is the reason I offer memoir ghostwriting services.

As Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, said regarding why he wrote a personal memoir about his parents, whom he admits lived unremarkable lives, memoirs exist “to utter what must not be erased.”

This is a pursuit for posterity, for all of the generations that come after us, for the grandkids who want to know where they come from, why they look and talk the way they do, and from where the lessons that guide their lives originated.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a project that AI is going to do for you. Your story exists in the minds of your family. And there is only one way to tell it, in the voices of the people who lived it.

It’s time to write.

Whether you think you have a story to be told or not. Whether you think your life has been interesting or not. Whether you think it’s worth your time to write about your own life or not. Whether you think you still have plenty of time to worry about it or not.

It’s time to write.

Someone will want to read it. And you never know whose life you will continue to impact.

There is a popular notion that we die twice: upon taking our final breath, and again when our name is uttered for the final time. What keeps us alive are our stories.

It’s time to write.