What Gets Lost When No One Asks

Holly: How much of your parents' life story lives only in their own memory? My guest today is Patrick Donahue, founder of Porchlight, a life-story tool that helps people in assisted living and memory care share stories from their lives with the people who care for them and the people who love them. Patrick, let's start with your own family. What led you to found Porchlight?

Patrick: My mother was a hospice nurse for twenty years, so I grew up hearing her stories. One thing she'd say was, "I had a really good death today." You'd think, how can a death be good? But in hospice the goal is comfort. Death is a life transition like any other, and everyone goes through it eventually. A good death means the pain and symptoms were treated, the person passed comfortably, often at home, and they felt they had taken care of what they needed to. For a lot of people that includes leaving something behind: a memoir, written or spoken.

Then there were my grandparents. My grandmother had a stroke and developed aphasia, where you believe you're speaking but what comes out is nonsense. Right after the stroke she still sounded like the same wise Southern matron she'd always been, and she seemed in good spirits. But after a year in the care home it caught up with her. She realized she couldn't speak anymore, and she became much more depressed and lonely.

My father cared for his own father at home, with help like Meals on Wheels and a bath aide. As your grandparents pass and your parents age, you want something to hold on to. People keep old clothes, a stuffed animal. I think something far more meaningful is to make the effort while they're still here to record their story. Speech-to-text and text-to-speech have advanced enormously: computer voices sound more natural than ever, and spoken words can be transcribed accurately. I work with those tools as a software engineer, and I wanted to apply them to recording a loved one's stories. That's Porchlight.

Holly: Tell us about Porchlight and the problem it solves.

Patrick: My father passed away three years ago, right after my daughter was born. In his last week we went on a hike together. He was the same person he'd always been, and he told me something I'd never heard: my grandfather served on the ground in the Korean War, seventy years ago. I thought, I wish I'd known that. Then he had a rare bad reaction to a surgery and died very suddenly.

So I asked myself two questions. How could I have captured his story in a friendly, unintrusive way? And thinking of my grandmother, lonely in her care home, how could technology improve her relationship with the people caring for her? When I researched the industry, I found caregivers have heavy workloads and high turnover, and people in memory care often lose their own story. Part of a caregiver's job becomes reminding residents who they are: "You got married here. You loved doing this." Doing that well raises their quality of life.

The concept is simple. A community signs up, and residents get a one-button app that asks them questions about their life, big ones and small ones. What they say is recorded, transcribed, and cleaned up so it reads well. Their family gets those stories too. Family members can listen, send voice notes back that the resident hears, and suggest new questions to get them talking. The whole idea is to get them talking.

As residents tell their stories, Porchlight builds a briefing about each one for the care team, so when someone comes on shift they have a starting point for connection. It can be hard and embarrassing to have someone help you with a bedpan or turn you in bed. When my wife and I had our two children at Evergreen Hospital here in Washington, the nurses were remarkable at putting us at ease. They told us about themselves and made it feel like a friend was having a chat while checking on your health. That relationship is what takes the embarrassment out of personal questions. If a caregiver knows this resident loves baseball and that one loves soccer, they know how to walk in and start that relationship.

If you work at a care community, we offer free trials. Put it in front of your residents and tell me what you think. I want feedback so the product fits what your caregivers and residents actually need.

Holly: When my mother moved into memory care, we had to fill out what I think was a 20-page packet of questions about her. It was daunting, and we didn't know some of the answers. Her memory was already at a point where even if she could answer, it might not be accurate. I wish her facility had had something like this three years ago, when she moved into assisted living and still had more of her memory. When you ask residents about something they're passionate about, they light up. I love that the family benefits too, with stories they never knew to ask about, and that they can ask questions back. So what happens as a resident ages and passes? Does the family keep an archive?

Patrick: Yes. The family always has access to what their loved one records, and they can download the audio and the transcripts at any time. The community also keeps it, and it can be archived or deleted on request. Privacy and the integrity of people's stories have to be honored. And if a family wants a printed book made from the stories, I'm happy to help with that. Some products put a QR code beside each passage so you can scan it and hear the voice behind the words.

Holly: My grandmother passed a couple of years ago at 95. Getting her story out was so important to her, and we tried all kinds of ways to help her record it. She was a computer user, but as she got older the technology got harder, and we missed the chance to capture her voice. She did write her story by hand, which is precious, but it's much shorter than it could have been. I've lived the story this would have helped with in more than one way.

Patrick: On my shelf I have a collection of yellowed photographs. My grandfather was born in the 1920s and drove a mule in Knox County, Tennessee. I inherited old photos and a few newspaper clippings, but they aren't as personal or as immediate as a recording of his voice would be. Today it's easy to come up with interview questions, record a voice, store it and transcribe it. We can pass on a much more complete legacy than the generations before us.

Holly: What do you see coming in technology that will change how we care for aging parents or keep their memories?

Patrick: I deliberately chose a fixed list of questions instead of AI-generated follow-ups. I wanted to start simple and let the people using it tell me what to add. Some people find the idea of talking to an AI creepy or dehumanizing. Personally I consult AI on nearly everything, but it has well-known limits, and you need the judgment to know when it's helping and when to turn to a real person. As conversational models improve, I expect older adults will talk with them, and that may help with loneliness and self-esteem. But the big AI companies don't have the connection to the care community or the family. Without that, the stories just get shoved into a digital shoebox. Do you think older people would enjoy talking to AI that way?

Holly: I think my grandmother would have been fine with it, and it probably depends on the person. But people our age, who are used to this technology, will age into it. For us it will be completely normal, the way computers eventually became normal for our parents. I think there's a lot of good change coming for senior care.

Holly: What feedback have you heard from facilities and residents?

Patrick: We're just starting out and looking for communities to partner with. The feedback so far is that it's especially helpful for activity and life-enrichment directors. They put together newsletters and work to build community among residents, and Porchlight pulls together a roundup of the best stories told. It also works as a group activity: residents share stories in the same room, and the director can introduce people using what they've said. "Holly told a story this week about her mother. Holly told us about her business." It's easy to schedule and it helps with the care team and with families outside the community.

Holly: And as residents share similar stories, maybe a director discovers that ten of the twenty people in a unit love baseball, and designs activities around that. That's hard to pull out of a stack of 20-page forms.

Patrick: Exactly. Favorite movies, music, other things in common across fifty or a hundred very different residents. They can aim their programming at the community they actually have.

Holly: You mentioned turnover. There's a lot of it among CNAs and hands-on caregivers. What's your vision for the caregiver who's brand new and trying to learn every resident?

Patrick: Picture being new on the floor. You review medical histories, then you go perform procedures for people you've never met. A personal introduction to every resident, kept up to date from their own interviews, would be indispensable. Not only would a new caregiver know that Grandpa Joe is managing pain with two medications, but also that he loves the Cubs, his son was in the military, and he used to live in Hawaii. They can start things off on the right note and build the caring, person-centered relationship the role calls for.

There's a lot of conflict between residents and caregivers. Residents can become agitated; they have memory issues and pain. We need empathy for both people in that room, because they've both been put in a hard position. Anything that gives them a better start means more patience, less conflict, a better community and better care. Families paying for care will be happier because their loved one has a better quality of life. I want to strengthen the relationship between the resident and the caregiver, between the resident and the community's leadership and enrichment staff, between the resident and other residents, and between the resident and their family. The AI doesn't replace any of these relationships. It's a resource that strengthens all of them and supports dignity and quality of life as people age.

Holly: I can see it helping with staff turnover too. If caregivers connect better with residents, and the information is right there, that's one more thing that helps people stay.

Patrick: If caregivers like the residents and the residents are easy to talk to, they keep showing up. It makes them feel at home in the job. And as they build up insider knowledge about the people they care for, the care keeps getting better, and fewer preferences get dropped because someone new didn't know.

Holly: One last question. For someone listening who's inspired to start capturing their parent's story right now, what's your advice?

Patrick: We have free trials at porchlight.ing, both for care communities and a family plan for people using it outside a community. But you don't need my product to do this. I've tried to connect some of the dots and automate the hard parts, but you can open a voice recorder, set it in front of your loved one, ask ChatGPT or your favorite AI for a list of questions, and just get them talking. Save the audio file. Transcribe it with any transcription tool.

Your loved one deserves that respect for everything they've done for you and everything their life has meant to you. Give them the dignity of recording their story. It's going to improve the relationship between the two of you, and it's going to help them feel better about their own life. Leaving something like this behind is part of leaving a legacy, and it helps them feel their life has been worthwhile.

Holly: That's a great place to leave it. Give them the respect and the dignity to leave their legacy. I guarantee you'll never regret asking those questions. A lot of people listening have sat at a bedside and wished they'd asked one more question. Now you have a reason to ask it. Your parents' story doesn't have to be perfect or complete. It only needs someone to ask and someone to listen.