My parents had extraordinary lives. I just never thought to ask about them while I had the chance.
My dad was born at two pounds in Calcutta in the late 1930s — the youngest of four, into some degree of poverty, and by his own admission, mostly forgotten. He arrived in a world I can barely imagine and somehow made his way to a life I took entirely for granted. My mum's story is different — a joyous, more affluent upbringing that I've only ever been led to believe was true. I'll never fully know.
And now my children will grow up with grandparents they'll remember only as older people. Not as the young, complicated, fascinating — and sometimes stressed, broken, and simply tired — human beings they actually were. Not the parents who somehow raised two raucous boys who spent most of their childhood fighting each other.
That gap haunts me. The version of them I never got to meet. The questions I left unasked.
Storied is my attempt to make sure other families don't feel that same loss. To give people the gift of asking — while there's still time.