The National World War II Museum’s web site opens with a frightening statement: “Approximately every two minutes a memory of World War II—its sights and sounds, its terrors and triumphs—disappears.  Yielding to the inalterable process of aging, the men and women who fought and won the great conflict are now in their 80s and 90s.  They are dying quickly—at the rate of 550 a day.”  The museum is in a race against time to record as many stories from these veterans as possible.  Their mission is to keep these experiences alive and real, to make history books flesh and blood.

The passage of time is also having a huge impact on another, very special, group of people from the same war: Holocaust survivors.  On December 6, 2013, The Wall Street Journal published an article about the rapidly dwindling numbers of men and women who experienced first-hand the horrors of the Holocaust and lived to tell their stories.   For example, of the 50,000 inmates in Bergen-Belsen at liberation, only about 2,000 survivors remain, according to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial and Museum.  Like with World War II veterans, there are several museums around the world racing to preserve as much of this history in survivors’ own words as possible.

What these museums show us, of course, is that history is not just dates and statistics, or the famous generals and politicians.  The impact of these museums comes from seeing a doll or reading a diary or hearing a voice, that there was a single living soul connected to that object.  It’s really about the cumulative effect of millions of individual, personal, private lives.

What grieves me about this race against time is how many stories are being lost.  I mean more than the heart-wrenching stories of bombings and starvation and heroism and cruelty.  These stories are, of course, vitally important.  But I also want to hear stories about going to the store to buy your first party dress; or what barbershops smelled like back then; or what wintertime felt like; or how the taste of carrots has changed over the decades.  I think about how many family stories—small, insignificant, interesting-only-to-the-speaker-and-listener type of family stories—will never be told or heard.

I started to think about small, quiet family stories because of an off-hand comment my father made a little while ago.  My 80-year-old father doesn’t see the need to buy any more clothes for himself.  He hasn’t bought anything for a few years now.  Even though his clothes are far from raggedy, his wardrobe is more along the lines of a comfortable habit than up-to-date trends.  My father has never been a fashion icon but for a lot of his adult life he’s had the means to buy himself new clothes whenever he felt he needed to.  But now my father felt, whether rightly or wrongly, that he had reached an age when he no longer needed to.

My mother asked me to get some warm clothes for my father this past Christmas.  I got my father a thermal shirt and a fleece vest.  I wasn’t there when my father opened the box (a week before Christmas) because we live in different states.  But he tried on the clothes and loved them.  When he Face Timed me to say thanks, he said, “These clothes are so fancy, I’m too embarrassed to wear them!”

I laughed because I thought what an odd comment that was.  I was about to tell him that the shirt and vest really weren’t that fancy when he asked, “Do you remember saying that the first time you got new clothes?”

When I was very young, I was very sickly.  So sickly, in fact, that my parents were afraid I might not live.  Because of this fear, my parents always dressed me in old, worn, patched, ugly clothes.  Their motivation was not based on the thought that I wasn’t worth buying new clothes for.  They were actually trying to protect me.  When I was a small child in Korea, people thought that if you dressed sickly children in nice clothes, Death would come and snatch that child away.  As it prowled the towns and countryside looking for feeble, dying souls, if Death saw a pretty but weak child, it would covet that child and take it.  But if that child were dressed in old, ugly clothes, Death wouldn’t be attracted and, instead, would overlook him or her.

When my parents finally determined that I was strong enough that Death couldn’t take me, my father bought me brand new clothes.  When he gave me my new clothes, my father told me this past Christmastime, the first thing I said was, “These clothes are so fancy!  I’m so embarrassed!  I don’t know how to wear new clothes!”  I have no memory of this, and my father laughed as he recounted this story.

What struck me, though, was how my father saw a parallel in our family story, how his new clothes to me when I was a very young child mirrored his new clothes from me now that I am a middle-aged woman and he is a grandfather.  The continuity of that connection, the survival and reincarnation of that memory, which in turn reinforces our lineage, are what make family stories so indispensable.

Another family story concerns a huge absence in terms of national cultural history.  Several years ago, I was reading a book on the history of Korean culture and customs.  My parents were visiting me, and my father asked me if he could borrow that book when I finished.  I was a little surprised because I assumed that since he had grown up in Korea, he already knew everything in the book.   But he told me that since he grew up under the Japanese occupation of Korea between World War 1 and World War 2, he didn’t learn much about his own country’s history.  The Japanese repressed as much of the Korean culture and identity as they could.  And because Korean history could not be taught in schools, my father always felt a big rupture in his connection to Korea’s history and past.

Interestingly enough, a very similar sentiment was expressed to me very recently by a man of Persian Jewish descent.  He currently lives in Ohio but grew up in Iran.  He has written a memoir about his childhood and about being Jewish in a conservative Muslim country, and I am currently editing the second edition of his memoir.  In his memoir, Isaac Yomtovian describes what it was like in the 1950s, when he learned for the first time about the Holocaust .  He had no idea anything like this had occurred, even though—or maybe because—Iran had close ties with Germany.  Most of his Jewish community in Tehran had no access to information from or connection with the “outside world” because of the repressive hold the conservative Muslim clergy had on education and information.

For my father and Isaac—and for me—these museums, and their collections or stories, are less about a promise never to forget and more about filling a gap in our identities.

Last fall, we took our son to college.  My husband, my son, and I got up early that morning, showered, had a quick breakfast, loaded up the car, and drove to Oberlin.  There were so many things I wanted to tell my son, so many words of wisdom I felt compelled to impart, but I kept most of them at bay because I knew he wouldn’t appreciate them right then and there.  Instead, we filled the time and space during the drive by watching the sky, making predictions about whether the rain would let up or not, how we would be able to move in if it started to pour, what his roommate would be like and if he had already settled in.  We talked about the traffic we were encountering on the way, we talked about whether two high-school buddies who were also going to be freshmen at Oberlin had started on their drives yet and what time they would arrive, and we laid out a schedule for the rest of the day.

At the end of the summer, we received notification from Oberlin that dorms would open at 9am on move-in day, so we wouldn’t be able to pick up keys before then.  We arrived at our son’s dorm at 8:20am.  We were not the first family to have arrived either.  Fortunately, the people in charge were ready for the obsessive compulsive parents of incoming freshmen and (keeping a wary eye on the changeable sky) handed out keys to all the early birds so we could keep on our schedule.  We were able to unload the car and move everything into our son’s room during a break in the rain.

That day, like so many move-in days around the country, was devoted solely to unpacking, organizing the dorm room, rearranging the furniture, making the bed, rearranging the furniture again, putting clothes away, setting up his laptop, rearranging the furniture once more, going to Walmart for all the stuff he didn’t bring from home, reorganizing his things, meeting the other people on his floor, going to opening talks, receptions, picnics, going back to Walmart, and rearranging the furniture for the last time.  In other words, there was absolutely no time for any final words of advice.

The next day was similar, though filled with different activities.  We had to go to orientation meetings for students and parents, open a bank account, fill out some more paperwork, squeeze in a lunch, meet professors, figure out where the mailboxes were.  The weather, like the day before, was tremendously hot and humid.  And really, I had forgotten all about the wonderful bits I was going to share with my son because all I could think about was how much I wanted to sit in a cold pool with a large ice coffee.  I dragged myself to a final session for parents while the students attended a different orientation session.

The parents’ session was about “Letting Go.”  I secretly snorted to myself because I thought myself an expert on letting go.  After all, I had already sent my daughter off to college and I had survived that pretty well.  My daughter and I still have a very close relationship; we chat regularly via lots of different technological marvels: text, Face Time, Snap Chat.  She knows how grateful I am when she calls me “just cuz,” so she makes sure to do it often.  I considered not going to this parent session because, in my hubris, I thought I didn’t need it.  There was nothing new the college administrators could tell me about letting go.  But, then I thought, it couldn’t hurt.  I don’t want my son skipping his college classes, so what am I going to say if he asks me how my meeting was?

So I went.  And the faculty member who spoke was the head of the counseling center on campus.  He talked about how maybe parents are full of last-minute advice they feel they need to give their children.  About how maybe parents are worried they didn’t teach their children well enough how to be: organized/proactive/disciplined/social/responsible/resilient/etc.  About how parents might be contrasting their children’s point in life—starting an exciting new phase, where the potential of the future is shining before them—with their own point in life—where perhaps the realities of adult life can be very different from what we imagined when we were 18.

And I thought to myself, how could he be talking so specifically about me?  How did he know about all the last-minute advice I wanted to give my son?  I wanted to tell him to be proactive—you can’t wait for someone to come and drop an opportunity into your lap.  Opportunities come only when you go search for them.  I wanted to tell him to persevere and advocate for himself.  Just because some rulebook somewhere says this is the rule doesn’t mean that it’s the rule.  If you make a good case for yourself, like why you really should be in a particular class or how much you could really help out on a research assignment, maybe someone will give you a chance.  And if the first person doesn’t, go on to the second person.  And I really wanted to tell him that these heady first days will be gone in the blink of an eye, that college will be over in the turn of the head.  So be prepared for what comes after and the only way to be prepared is to think ahead, start planning now, know what you need to know.

I was thinking a lot about whether, as a parent, I had prepared him well enough to face the world.  But part of me was also thinking about whether I had prepared myself well enough for what I faced.  Who am I now that I don’t have kids at home anymore?  Who am I if I no longer monitor if my kids are sleeping enough, if they are eating the right foods in the right amounts, if they’re safe, if they’re happy and well-adjusted, if they’re doing all the assignments they’re supposed to be doing—or if I’m only worrying about these things remotely now?

Being mostly a stay-at-home mom has been so wonderful for me.  But now I have to figure out what I am because being an empty-nester is more about a lack than about something positive.  In the weeks and months before we took our son to college, people would ask me, “So, what are you going to do with all your time without kids at home?”  as if every second of every waking minute was devoted solely to my kids.  In response, I’d just joke, “Oh, sit in bed all day eating bon-bons and watching Oprah.”  In reality, I can only follow my own advice: search out opportunities because they won’t search me out; advocate for myself; be resilient and persevere.