I don’t know exactly when I started writing to them. Somewhere in the blur of appointments and bad news, I just started putting words on paper, for my kids, about their grandfather, about a man they were about to lose before they’d really had the chance to know him.
He was 60. The diagnosis was a brain tumor. And suddenly I understood something I hadn’t let myself think about before: there is no guarantee of time. Not for him, not for any of us.
I wrote about the sound of his laugh. The way he said my name. Things I was terrified I would forget, and things I desperately wanted my children to know, even if they weren’t old enough yet to understand them.
I didn’t know what I was building at the time. I just knew I couldn’t let the words stay unwritten.
It took me years to understand that this feeling, the need to say something before it’s too late, is something almost everyone carries quietly. A thing unsaid to a parent. A letter never finished to a child. Words meant for a future that hasn’t arrived yet.
Timely Hello exists because of that feeling. Because I believe the words don’t have to wait for the perfect moment to be written, only to be delivered. Write it now, while it’s still true, still clear, still yours. We’ll hold it safely until the day it’s needed.
If there’s something you haven’t said yet, don’t wait for the right time. Write it, and let the right time come to it.
With love,
Kim Maher