Why I built MyDear

My dad has always been a storyteller. Not the performing kind. The kind who, somewhere around the dinner table, lands on a memory and follows it wherever it goes. How he got his first job. The people he grew up around. Something his own father said once that he never forgot. We had heard some of them more than a few times, and we loved them anyway.

One day it hit me, the way obvious things sometimes do, late. Those stories only exist because he is here to tell them. The day he isn’t, they go with him, every one we never thought to write down.

So I asked him about it. Had he ever thought of putting some of it on paper? A memoir, or even just the stories we always ask him to tell again. He liked the idea. Then he ran into the thing that stops almost everyone. He didn’t know where to start, or how to keep it all straight. A blank page is a hard place to begin a whole life.

So we made it small. A simple 30-day plan, one gentle question a day, worked through together at a coffee shop. He talked. I listened. The questions did the organizing. There was no blank page anymore, just the next small thing to remember.

I built the rest of it with my son, Batu. Once we saw what those mornings were doing, for the stories and for the two of us, we wanted other families to be able to do the same. So Batu and I turned it into a real tool. He’s the one you see in the film on our homepage, holding his grandfather’s finished book.