What do you want to do with the events of your life?

Lose them to other people’s memories? Or preserve them forever?

When my father died in his bed, nearly all of his small family were with him in his bedroom where we’d set up the folding chairs.

There we sat,?five or six?people of various ages, staring at a shrunken and wasted man who was dying of cancer at only 59 years old. In the bedroom next door slept his only grandchild, who would turn one?year old tomorrow.

It had been a torturous five-year struggle and although we didn’t want to lose him, we wanted him to be finished suffering. I was at the foot of the bed where my father—the mighty man who could once fix or build?anything, who lifted his children?off the floor as we hung on his biceps—lay gurgling through his final breaths. Such long pauses separated each one, we’d all look at each other… surely this was his last?

Suddenly, I saw us as cold spectators to an?isolated man’s last moments before taking the journey we all take alone.?I couldn’t bear that he was by himself while we all stared with our still-healthy eyes.

So I crept carefully onto the bed.

There was a quiet collective gasp of surprise.

I lay my body alongside my father’s skeletal frame in the most?intimate moment I’d ever known with him, and started talking quietly.

“Dad, it’s OK to let go now. You were a great father; you did a wonderful job. We’re all here, loving you and sending you on your way. Thank you for all you did and gave us, Dad. It’s OK to be done now. I love you, Dad. It’s OK to let go.”

One by one, the family began to slide forward, pulling their chairs closer, touching the bed or his clothes or sitting next to him, each saying their own last precious words of love.?

My mother who’d nursed him and comforted him through his cancer fear, anger, and despair, sighed and nodded from the foot of the bed. All the important things had long been said between them. They’d held each other for so long—through so much—that she let everyone else get in close for?their last touch. “Let go, Honey,” she said, “Let go, my love.”?

His mother, doing what no mother should have to do, watched her child struggle to be in this world but need to be out of it. Her tiny wrinkled hand held the only part of him she could reach, his ankle. She dabbed her pale eyes with one hand and refused to let go with the other. His sister laid a hand on her mother’s back and another on her brother’s leg. “It’s OK, Bus,” she said, using his childhood nickname. “It’s OK.”

My sister slid alongside the bed to hold his hand. “I love you, Dad,” she said to the father who’d loved her and taught her and bequeathed his skills to her. “It’s time to let go, Dad. I love you so much.” Her head fell onto her hand holding his, hot tears dripping across his fingers and wetting the blanket.?

The room was thick with stifled sobs, flooding memories, the scent of death, and anticipated relief.

Writing your memoir is a gift to yourself, your loved ones, and the world.

My dad wasn't the most revealing guy in the world. We knew almost nothing about his military service, his despair as a young boy over losing a brother who suddenly disappeared, or even what he liked to do as a young boy. We only knew the funny, responsible, skilled guy dedicated to his family.

I'm currently reading BLACK WOMEN IN WHITE AMERICA: A Documentary History, edited by Gerda Lerner (Vintage Books,1972). The entire 614 pages are full of awesome accounts of how Black women lived, suffered, overcame, influenced, built, and represented despite the oppression, boundaries, and violence of the deep racism that has always been at the core of American culture and history.

Without many of these women's memoirs or journals—or the rare time someone documented their actions—we would not know their lives. Martha Harrison was twelve years old during the Civil War. She could not know her stories would teach and touch me 160 years later. Susie King Taylor lived in a Black Union army camp. But without her memoir I wouldn't understand the personal and intimate life of soldiers and their families, trying to build a life amidst the constant threat of being captured and re-enslaved.

Every personal story teaches me lessons I can't experience in my life. I wish I could have learned more from my dad's memories.

Your memoir is the collection of history you created.

Capture and preserve it for whoever wants to know, to relive, to understand. If you don't want to write, record your stories on video. Tell us—your future readers—not only what happened, but how it made you feel.

You may never know who it will touch. But write it anyway. It's important.