The Grandmother Problem
My grandmother died in 2007, in Jeonju, in the house she had lived in for most of her adult life. I flew back for the funeral and stood around with relatives I had not seen in years, and people said the things people say, and I said them back. It was not until the plane home that I realized I did not know, and now would never know, what she had wanted to be when she was young.
I knew the shape of her. I knew the wrinkle of her hands. I knew the twang of her South Jeolla Korean accent, which tickled me to my bone. I knew she loved me. These are not small things. But they are not, as it turns out, the things I wish I had asked.
I wish I had asked what her first memory was. I wish I had asked what her mom was like. I wish I had asked what it was like to be a young woman under Japanese occupation, finding moments of happiness in a country about to break.
I wish I had asked what she thought of the internet, the first time she sent an email. Or even what she thought of the phone, the first time she heard her son’s voice from Pennsylvania, on the other side of the world, learning a language she never understood. I wish I had asked whether she was afraid of dying, and if so, of what - the pain, the forgetting, the leaving, the unknown.
I didn’t ask any of it. I thought I had time, and then I didn’t. That is the shape of the thing, and I know I’m not alone.
Call this the grandmother problem, though it isn’t really about grandmothers. It is about the particular category of person who is so present in our lives that we mistake proximity for knowledge. We assume that because we have been in the room with someone for thousands of hours, we know their stories. We don’t. We have the surface: the gestures, the dishes, the phrases they repeated. The interior is a country we were always going to visit later.
A sentence I keep coming back to is one I wrote a while ago, in an essay about lost memory: the things we know about them, we know well - a feeling, a gesture, a taste. But what about everything we never thought to ask? There is a grief that comes not from losing someone but from discovering, after they are gone, how much of them was never yours to begin with. You find out you loved a sketch. The painting was always in the other room.
Part of what makes this hard is that the interview never feels natural in advance. You cannot sit your grandmother down across a kitchen table and say, tell me what it was like when your father died. The question sounds like homework. It sounds like a podcast. It sounds, above all, like you have decided she is about to become a memory, and this is the opposite of what you want her to feel on a Tuesday afternoon in October. So you don’t ask, and you tell yourself you will ask on the next visit, and on the next visit you hold her wrinkled hands and talk about all your little problems, because that is what you do in a life that is still happening.
The other part of what makes it hard is the asymmetry of memory. Our elders usually want to tell us. The generations above us are often starving to be asked - not because they are vain, but because they have lived through things that almost no one asks them about anymore, and the weight of an unshared life is real. My grandmother once, late at night, started telling me a story about walking to school during the war and having to hide in a ditch, and I remember being seventeen and not knowing what to do with it, and changing the subject.
Now, I think about that ditch a lot.
The reason we started Ember is, more or less, this essay. We wanted to build a thing that makes the interview natural - that handles the awkwardness of tell me what it was like by putting it in a form nobody has to sit across a table for. We wanted to build a thing that turns an hour of talking into something a granddaughter in 2070 could see, hear, read, and hold. We wanted to make it stupidly easy to ask, and stupidly easy to answer, because the cost of not asking is too high.
But even if Ember did not exist, we would want to say this: go ask. Not the big existential questions, not yet. Ask your mother what her first apartment smelled like. Ask your father what he ate for lunch when he was twelve. Ask your grandfather which of his friends he misses the most, and wait through the silence for the answer. You will be surprised how quickly the small questions open the large ones, and you will be more surprised how much they want to be asked.
There is a version of this essay that ends with a line about how it is never too late. That is not true. Sometimes it is too late. My grandmother is in the ground in Jeonju, and I will not know what she wanted to be when she was young, and that is a fact I will carry around for the rest of my life.
What I can tell you is that it was too late for me and it is not yet too late for you. The people you love are, right now, sitting somewhere, doing something ordinary. They know things you will spend the rest of your life wishing you had asked.
Ask.