About Being There

I built Being There for my dad.

My dad likes to tell stories.

Some of them I've heard more times than I can count.

There was a time when that could feel repetitive. Now I understand that there may come a day when I would give almost anything to hear one of those stories one more time, told in his voice, exactly the way he tells it.

My dad is living with changes that can make conversation harder. Families dealing with dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other conditions know the feeling: someone you love is right there, but sometimes you don't know how to reach them. You don't know what to ask. They may not find the word. A conversation that once happened without thinking can suddenly need a place to begin.

He still has stories. He still laughs. He still recognizes things that matter to him. He can still surprise us. And the people who love him still want time with him.

I didn't want to build something that tested his memory. I didn't want to correct him, score him, or turn his life into a collection of symptoms and records.

I wanted to make it easier to sit down with my dad and talk.

Sometimes all you need is a picture.

Maybe we're sitting together and an old photo gives him somewhere to start. Maybe one of his grandkids is hundreds of miles away, calls him on the phone, and puts that same picture on his tablet.

They can say, “Grandpa, look at the picture. Tell me about that.”

His grandkid can move to the next picture from their own phone. Dad can move to the next one himself. The technology doesn't need to become the conversation. It just needs to help the conversation happen.

No folders. No explaining where the file went. No complicated controls. Just something familiar in front of two people who want to spend some time together.

Tell it again, Dad.

Being There is not a quiz. There is no right answer.

If Dad tells the same story again, that's okay. Maybe a different grandchild is hearing it for the first time. Maybe this time he remembers a different detail. Maybe nothing is different at all.

It is still his story. And we still get to hear him tell it.

The person matters more than the data.

And when the conversation is over, we can keep it.

Dad's original voice can be saved with the memory that brought the story back. Someone who couldn't be there that day can hear it later. A grandchild can send him a picture today and years from now still hear what their grandfather had to say about it.

Those memories shouldn't belong to an app. Original photos and recordings are kept in the family's own Google Drive. Being There helps us share and experience them, but the family keeps the originals.

Because I am building this for my family, I want the important part to outlive the software.

Why “Being There”?

There are diseases that can slowly change the ways someone remembers, speaks, moves, or connects with the people around them.

We can't always fix that.

And sometimes we become so afraid of saying the wrong thing that we don't know what to say at all.

But we can sit beside them.

We can call.

We can show them the old picture.

We can listen to the story we've already heard a hundred times.

We can laugh at the same part again.

We can let a grandchild who lives far away have that moment too.

And on the days when conversation is harder, we don't have to make them prove that they remember us in order for our time together to matter.

This is for my dad.

Being There started because I wanted more good moments with him, and I wanted the rest of our family to have them too.

I'm making the page public because I know our family isn't the only one trying to figure this out.

If you have someone in your life who is getting harder to reach, maybe you don't need the perfect question.

Maybe pull out an old picture. Call them. Sit down beside them. Ask for the story again.