Why I Stopped Buying My Dad Things for Father's Day
Every year, my siblings and I asked ourselves the same question.
What do you get a man who has everything?
We tried the usual answers. A new tool. A gift card. A shirt he would wear once. And every year, we wrapped something up, handed it to him, and watched him smile politely. He was grateful. He always was. But we all knew what it was. A placeholder for not knowing what else to do.
A few years ago, I started thinking about that differently.
My dad was in his mid-sixties. Healthy. Active. By most measures, fine. But I had been doing some math, and the math has a way of changing how you see things. If he lived to the average life expectancy, I had maybe fifteen years of normal time left with him. Fifteen Father's Days.
That number did not make me afraid. It made me want to be intentional.
And it made me realize something. The thing I actually wanted from my dad was not something I could find on Amazon. I wanted to know his story. I wanted to hear him talk about what it felt like to become a father, what he was scared of, what he hoped I would remember about him. I wanted his voice on a recording that my kids could watch someday.
So we recorded him.
We sat him down and let him talk. About his life, his regrets, the things he was proud of. And what we got back was not a gift for him. It was a gift for us.
That is what most dads actually want too, even if they would never ask for it. They want to know their life mattered. They want to know their stories will outlast them.
This Father's Day, consider giving something that cannot be wrapped. At Roots & Story, we come to your home, guide your parent through a full life story interview, and produce a video your family will return to for generations. It is the gift nobody thinks to ask for and nobody ever forgets.
