Recently, my mother passed away and one of the things I miss is the chance I never had to interview her for a family video. Capturing all the stories she use to share with me and the family history that she remembered. She was the last of five siblings that lived on a family plot for more than 100 years. And now sadly all that she remembered is gone. Some of the things that we forget about or that we lose, we don’t remember until we want to turn around and ask. For me, it was the things that my mom would cook that nobody else would. Food and hosting was her love language.

She’d been an Air Force nurse and traveled the world and seen places I probably never will. She spent a decade in the US Air Force as a nurse and then worked for another 30 years as a nurse in different government and private hospitals. She was one of the kindest and most loving people you will ever meet.

Faye Lanell Wilson (1942-2023)

She lived in Tehran, Iran as part of the US envoy there in the early 1960s. She learned how to cook Persian food from some of the locals that she worked with on the base and in the hospital there. Living and growing up in a middle-class suburban house in the US South, I would eat Persian food that my mom would make. It was delicious but not the norm for most of my friends. We had Spanish dishes from where my parents have been posted there. I remember stories about how cheap beef ribs were because they were throw away meat cuts in Spain.

We ate at the local Greek restaurant and she would talk about going to Greece and that was one of my favorite travel the world history projects. Pictures she had taken of Athens taped to a poster board and shown to my classmates. And also, we had stuff from where she grew up chicken-fried steak, cheese straws, pecan pies with enough sugar to tear the fillings out of your teeth. It’s those kinds of things that I’ve lost now that she’s gone.

We need to teach our students to talk to the ones around them, to learn how to capture what’s important for later, before you know it. So if you have a chance before the end of the year to work with students, teach them how to be family journalists or biographers, encourage them to do so. We need to make sure they know that time isn’t forever and that we need the opportunities to share with others what we learn from the ones that we love. It’s my job now to try and remember all the things that she told me before I forget it, so that way my family will know. And I’ll forget it, or I’ll get it wrong, or I’ll get the stories halfway there, but I’ll do my best to remember what I can. I spent time during my Christmas Break looking up Lubia Polo recipes on YouTube; so that, I can start trying to recreate my favorite dish of hers.