This is Why We Write

A rationale, or a rationalization.

Photo ©2012, Ted Anthony.

One brief musing about storytelling per day (or, more likely, as frequently as I can muster).

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Jan. 3, 2026

AT THE END of her life, my mother did not remember the name of Glannon’s, the shopping center at the corner of Mount Royal and Ferguson where she and my father used to take me when I was little.

Before he died, my father did not recall teaching me to wrangle iron filings with his pen-magnet, which still sits in his study, now my study. Nor could he summon the name of the first Anthony in America, Manoel Antonio, whose name he taught me as liturgy so many years ago.

Names of their friends. When things happened. Routes to familiar places. Small things, important things. Gone, except that I remember them. My parents’ memories found a home in me. Stories they told me. Stories that I wrote down.

This is why we write.

DEATH AND AGE steal from us what we have collected on our journeys. Time puts them in limbo, locks them in distant, impenetrable cabinets never to be retrieved.

Those collections are ours only in our most lucid, highest moments. We think we own them, but we are only their temporary stewards. And unlike physical things, they cannot be passed on.

Unless we write.

We write for our lives. We write for our loved ones’ lives. We write for our fellow human beings’ lives. We are drowning in a cacophony of words and images, and still somehow we write.

We write for other people — people we don’t know, and may never know — who might one day come across our weird and miscellaneous mental collections and make connections or add ideas or create better paths for themselves and for others.

WE WRITE BECAUSE, barring faith, it is the only way we can be permanent.

We write down the things that we will forget, so that they can take one more step toward being real, so that they can endure beyond the hopelessly simple, hopelessly complex electrical signals that are our brainwaves.

We write to wrestle our meager fragments of the world into a semi-coherent narrative to which our descendants can add. We write to survive, to endure, to maybe be something close to eternal.

This is why we write.

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