I have been writing all my life and I’ve kept most of what I have written. Now the question of what to do with it all is very real. Whatever that writing lacks, it is a history of my life, and as an old proverb notes, “The palest ink is more accurate than the sharpest memory.” Published or not, it’s my body of work, the fruit of my efforts, the summing up of what I’ve learned and lived over all these decades.

Do all writers have this dilemma at the end of their lives? Surely they must, but what do they do about it, if they’re unpublished and unknown?

Even though what I’ve written may not be important to anyone else, I can’t bear to be the one to destroy it. So I’m trying to do the next best thing: put it in order so that my family can read or keep whatever has meaning for them and get rid of the rest.

Most problematic to my children will be my journals—thirteen bankers’ boxes full so far, in all sizes of bound and spiral notebooks. I have always kept them carefully private, and for many years I had no thought of anyone’s ever reading them, although I always knew they contained the truest history of myself. Now I have mixed feelings about them; as a record of some tumultuous years, how shocking or hurtful might some of my expressed emotions be to others? In old age, I’ve been more conscious that what I write may be read someday, and I write with a little more reserve. At any rate, the journals are boxed up, labeled as to date, and safely stored.

A bigger concern now is my computer hard drive. Most of what’s on it is my own writing. Hundreds of daily quotas on various subjects just for practice. Dozens of opinion columns, a few essays I’m sort of proud of, my responses to senior-citizen writing class assignments, and letters. Years’ worth of my struggles with jobs and relationships, endless plans for managing my life, stages in the person I was and have become, notes I kept during various family crises. The more my memory fails in old age, the gladder I am to have kept them.

I’m realizing more and more as I write this how little it will even matter to anyone except me. Maybe the most important thing I can do is to read back through my work myself, before my eyesight and my health are any further gone. I’m the one, after all, who has always sought to learn from what I wrote.