This is an archived blog from when I ran Conscious Public Relations Inc. from 2008-2018. Excuse the potential outdated-ness!
This past weekend I crossed one item off my bucket list – publishing my paternal grandfather’s life story. Some of my blogs have talked about him as he was a very important figure in our family and led quite an extraordinary life. Around 1997, I started to get a reputation from this side of the family about being a good writer, and so for years my family had urged me to write his biography or make a documentary about him. The closest I got was a compilation of his life events based on stories he’s told, anecdotes from his children, photos, and documents that we found in his possession at the time of his death in 2014. It may not be a professionally published book, but it pretty well counts as my first published story, with contributions made by a dozen or so other family members.
My grandfather had a first wife before he met my grandmother, and so I have a half-aunt that I have never met. During the project I was able to get in touch with her daughter (my half cousin) and get so much information about her side of the family that I never knew about. All of a sudden my family grew by another 13 members!
At last night’s friendship, we made gratitude cards and one of my friends talked about giving a card to her mother. Recently, another friend and Leo had family members pass away, so it made me think about how precious our time with family is. Even if we do not spend a lot of time with them due to geography or other reasons, there is something we can learn from either their experiences or our experiences of them.
The creation of the book was a huge family team effort that took two years. It took more effort to make this than any client project I’ve worked on, so seeing it complete gives me a huge amount of gratitude and confidence in what families everywhere can accomplish together.
