In almost every family, there is someone who knows things nobody else does.
They know exactly how their mother takes her coffee, which tablets their father takes after supper, and why a particular bedroom window must never be opened in winter.
They know where the old documents are kept, who the people in the photograph by the stairs were, and why the family still has a key that no longer opens anything.
None of these details seems particularly important while the person who knows them is still around.
We don't ask.
We put it off.
We assume there will always be time to hear the story.
Then one day, we need the answer to a perfectly ordinary question and discover that the only person who knew it is no longer here.
We open an old drawer.
Find a letter without a date.
A photograph of people whose names we don't know.
A telephone number that no longer works.
We wonder why somebody kept these things for so many years.
And there is nobody left to ask.
The strange thing about losing someone is that they take more than their presence with them.
They take their particular understanding of a home.
The names they called people.
The stories they told so often that we grew tired of hearing them.
The small pieces of knowledge we never realised needed somebody's memory in order to survive.
Perhaps this is why familiar things change after the people who used them are gone.
The chair remains a chair, but it is no longer quite the same place.
The plate stays in the cupboard, but nobody uses it in precisely the same way.
The clock remains on the wall, although the person who always adjusted it is no longer there.
We tend to remember loss through its larger moments.
The last visit.
The final telephone call.
The words we wish we had said.
Yet what we miss later may be something far smaller.
The sound of a spoon against a teacup.
The way someone closed a door.
A familiar question every evening: "Have you eaten?"
Or a voice calling our name from another room for no particular reason.
These things would rarely appear in anybody's biography.
Yet somehow, they are what make a person part of the fabric of our lives.
There is another sadness in realising that we can know somebody for decades without ever asking much about the life they lived before we knew them.
What were they like as a child?
What did they dream of becoming?
Who was their first love?
What frightened them?
Were they happy?
We often know our parents chiefly through the roles they play in our lives.
We forget that they had lives before us, dreams in which we did not feature, and disappointments they may never have spoken about.
That the person sitting in their usual chair today was once young, hurrying towards a future they could not yet imagine.
I don't think we should spend our lives frightened of losing people.
That would make living unbearably heavy.
But perhaps we could be a little more curious about those we love.
Ask about the old photographs.
Listen to the story we have heard ten times before. There may be something in the eleventh telling that we never noticed.
Record a voice. Write down a recipe. Learn a name. Ask why that old key has been kept.
Not because everything must be preserved.
But because some things, once lost, cannot be recovered by anyone.
When someone dies, we lose more than the things they used to tell us. We also lose the answers to questions we never thought to ask.
— Malek Ayoub