One of the sadnesses of life is that children sometimes don’t know their parents. Know them in the sense of the little facts of their history, what motivated them, how things came to pass.I started thinking about this a while back. One of my grandmothers grew up in western North Carolina, but then lived in Wilmington (a coastal port) North Carolina for a time, and graduated from high school there. And we don’t know how that move came to be. It was in a time when moving was difficult and not done often and America was still regionalized enough that even moving from one part of a state to another carried more tension than it would now.It’s a small fact but I wish I knew the story behind it. No one in the family knows and the grandmother in question died in 1988.You can help avoid those puzzles for your family and the way to do it is to write your life story. This sounds both more ominous and more cosmic than it is. Very plainly, tell your family the story of your life. You think they know about it, but it’s very likely there are huge swaths of your life they know nothing about. (This is not the time to reveal Big Secrets. If there’s something about your life that your family does not know about, it’s not good to reveal it in writing, especially if they will be reading it after you’re no longer around).No, what you want here are the little things of your life – the things that make you different from others. This isn’t the time to comment on historical events or politics or anything like that. Just tell your family about the little things they would not know. How was your early childhood? What was school like for you? What was your early home like? What foods did you like? You might talk about religious and cultural aspects of your childhood. What were holidays like for you? That sort of thing. Just tell. Don’t censor things because they seem trivial or unimportant. It’s the small things that make up your life. Obviously, I can’t tell you what you should include. The primary advice in writing your story is to include more than you think you should. Tell the story like you’d tell a story to someone who wants to know. Because – guaranteed – there are those who will come after you who will want to know.