A 95-year-old woman who wrote her life story with me shared the story with her family. Her son, who is a doctor, pointed out that she hadn't mentioned that a particular hereditary disease runs in their family. She doesn't have it, and neither of her children does. But if she mentions it, Her Son The Doctor pointed out, his grandchildren and their children and their children who read her story will learn that they, too, could carry the disease. Her written story, he said, might be the only way this information gets relayed from one generation to the next. … We will be updating her story with this additional information, and I just added a prompt to my master list of questions for those in my classes. I also added this very important reason to my growing list of why people should write their stories in the first place.

#writing