The first voice you hear on the recording is mine. “Here we are,” I say. My tone is cheerful, but a catch in my throat betrays how nervous I am.

Then, a little grandly, I pronounce my father’s name: “John James Vlahos.”

August 2017. Subscribe to WIRED.

“Esquire,” a second voice on the recording chimes in, and this one word—delivered as a winking parody of lawyerly pomposity—immediately puts me more at ease. The speaker is my dad. We are sitting across from each other in my parents’ bedroom, him in a rose-colored armchair and me in a desk chair. It’s the same room where, decades ago, he calmly forgave me after I confessed that I’d driven the family station wagon through a garage door. Now it’s May 2016, he is 80 years old, and I am holding a digital audio recorder.

Sensing that I don’t quite know how to proceed, my dad hands me a piece of notepaper marked with a skeletal outline in his handwriting. It consists of just a few broad headings: “Family History.” “Family.” “Education.” “Career.” “Extracurricular.”

“So … do you want to take one of these cat­egories and dive into it?” I ask.

“I want to dive in,” he says confidently. “Well, in the first place, my mother was born in the village of Kehries—K-e-h-r-i-e-s—on the Greek island of Evia …” With that, the session is under way.

We are sitting here, doing this, because my father has recently been diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. The disease has metastasized widely throughout his body, including his bones, liver, and brain. It is going to kill him, probably in a matter of months.

So now my father is telling the story of his life. This will be the first of more than a dozen sessions, each lasting an hour or more. As my audio recorder runs, he describes how he used to explore caves when he was growing up; how he took a job during college loading ice blocks into railroad boxcars. How he fell in love with my mother, became a sports announcer, a singer, and a successful lawyer. He tells jokes I’ve heard a hundred times and fills in biographical details that are entirely new to me.

Three months later, my younger brother, Jonathan, joins us for the final session. On a warm, clear afternoon in the Berkeley hills, we sit outside on the patio. My brother entertains us with his favorite memories of my dad’s quirks. But as we finish up, Jonathan’s voice falters. “I will always look up to you tremendously,” he says, his eyes welling up. “You are always going to be with me.” My dad, whose sense of humor has survived a summer of intensive cancer treatments, looks touched but can’t resist letting some of the air out of the moment. “Thank you for your thoughts, some of which are overblown,” he says. We laugh, and then I hit the stop button.

In all, I have recorded 91,970 words. When I have the recordings professionally transcribed, they will fill 203 single-spaced pages with 12-point Palatino type. I will clip the pages into a thick black binder and put the volume on a bookshelf next to other thick black binders full of notes from other projects.

But by the time I put that tome on the shelf, my ambitions have already moved beyond it. A bigger plan has been taking shape in my head. I think I have found a better way to keep my father alive.