What Dies With the Old by Avril Shakira Villar

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There is a question that appears with surprising regularity on Filipino social media pages, on grandchildren’s blogs, on the forums of overseas Filipino workers separated from their elders by distance and time zones. The question takes many forms, but it is always essentially the same question: “How do I get my lola to tell me her stories before it is too late?” It is a question that reveals, in its urgency, something people already understand: that the knowledge a grandmother carries requires deliberate effort to pass from one generation to the next, and that the window for that effort can close without warning.

According to Aaron Holt of the United States National Archives and Records Administration, it takes only three generations to lose a piece of oral family history. The story must be, in his words, “purposely and accurately repeated over and over again through the generations to be preserved.” Family historians at FamilySearch, one of the largest genealogical databases in the world, have documented this phenomenon consistently: without active effort, a grandparent’s stories are known by their children, partially remembered by their grandchildren, and largely unknown to their great-grandchildren.

In the Philippines, the lola occupies a role that is difficult to translate into categories that other cultures would recognize. The Cultural Atlas, a cross-cultural reference produced by SBS Australia, documents that in the Philippine household structure, it is often a matriarch in charge — generally the oldest female, typically the grandmother. In many Filipino homes, the lola manages family finances, mediates disputes, administers folk remedies, and serves as the living connection to everything that came before the generation currently standing in front of her. She is, in the most practical and non-metaphorical sense, the archive. She is the institution that holds the records that no government office has bothered to keep.

The tradition of the Filipino grandmother as keeper of knowledge has a documented literary and historical genealogy. In 1925, the writer Severino Reyes began publishing a series of stories in the Tagalog magazine Liwayway under the pen name Lola Basyang. The series, Mga Kuwento ni Lola Basyang (The Stories of Grandmother Basyang), ran until his death in 1942 and eventually comprised more than 400 tales. According to academic analysis published in the International Research in Children’s Literature, Lola Basyang was deliberately constructed as the archetypal Filipino grandmother storyteller — a wise matriarch addressing her grandchildren directly, embedding moral knowledge and cultural identity within narratives that mimicked pre-colonial oral practices.

What Reyes understood, and what scholars of Filipino culture have continued to document, is that the lola’s storytelling function was never purely entertainment. Research on intergenerational learning in the Philippines, published in the Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education, finds that intergenerational learning in the Filipino context is deeply embedded in everyday life and community participation. This framework, developed by the psychologist Virgilio Enriquez, identifies the family and community as the primary arenas for knowledge transmission — the elder, speaking. The lola in this framework is, in many respects, the primary one.

What this means in practice is that when a lola dies, a curriculum disappears with her. The curriculum of a specific life lived in a specific place across a specific span of historical time. She knew which neighbor kept the spare key. She knew which plants her own grandmother had used for which ailments, and the names of those plants in a dialect that her grandchildren speak imperfectly and her great-grandchildren may not speak at all. She knew the texture of life before electricity reached the province, before the road was paved, before the jeepney route changed. She knew the histories of the people around her not as dates and documents but as stories with causes and consequences and characters she had known personally.

The specific regret that follows the death of a grandparent has its own well-documented character. It is the regret of questions never asked. A study published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management found that approximately one-third of bereaved family members regretted not having talked enough with their loved one before death. The writer behind The Good Trade, who lost both grandparents by the age of thirteen, described this regret plainly: “To this day, it is one of my deepest regrets, and I would give nearly anything to have one final conversation with them.” This is, by the documentation of bereavement researchers, a near-universal one. The pattern is consistent enough that it has produced an entire genre of resource — the list of questions to ask your grandparents while you still can — that proliferates online with the urgency of something people recognize they have been postponing.

The scale of what disappears when old people die is a matter of documented global concern. A 2022 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examining medicinal plant knowledge across regions of the Americas, found approximately 12,000 medicinal uses for more than 3,000 plant species, held by speakers of 230 Indigenous languages. More than 75 percent of this knowledge existed in only one of those languages. When the last speaker of that language dies, the knowledge closes. The researchers found that the Tsimane people of Bolivia were losing traditional plant knowledge at a rate of approximately 3 percent per year — faster than the rate of biodiversity loss itself. We are losing what humans know about the natural world faster than we are losing the natural world.

In the Philippines, this dynamic plays out at every level simultaneously. At the level of national culture, the movement of millions of Filipinos from provinces to cities, and from the country to abroad, has accelerated the distance between generations and the conditions under which knowledge can be transmitted. At the level of Indigenous communities, the linguistic erosion documented globally is present here too, in the dozens of Philippine languages and dialects that are slowly contracting. And at the level of the individual family, the lola sits in a province while her grandchildren grow up in Manila or in Dublin or in Riyadh, connected by video calls that are better than nothing but are not the same as sitting together in the same room while she speaks.

The research on why families fail to preserve this knowledge before it disappears is fairly consistent. People assume there is more time. The grandparent seems permanent, a fixed feature of the family landscape, and the questions feel less urgent than the demands of everyday life. A survey cited by Heritage Whisper found that 47 percent of Americans regret not recording their loved ones’ voices — a number suggesting that nearly half of all people discover too late that they wanted what they can no longer have. Jim Ison, an accredited genealogist and area manager for FamilySearch, described the realization that changed his approach to his own family’s history: he was the connecting link between his grandchildren and his grandparents, and if he did not act deliberately, that link would not hold. He put aside years of genealogical research to focus on the living accounts of his parents and grandparents.

In the Filipino context, this is multiplied by the specific cultural weight that the lola carries. She is, in documented cultural terms, the storyteller, the knowledge keeper, the matriarch who manages the finances and mediates the disputes and administers the folk remedies and connects every living member of the family to every generation that preceded them. When she dies, a role disappears that the family structure was built around, and the family must reorganize itself in her absence without ever fully recovering what she held.

There is one thing that the documentation of all this loss consistently suggests, and it is not complicated: the time to ask is before you wish you had. The questions that feel too small to ask — what did your mother’s kitchen smell like, what was the name of that plant your grandmother used, what happened in the years before we were born, what do you know that you have never thought to tell us — are the questions that will feel enormous after the person who could answer them is gone. According to Aaron Holt of the National Archives, the oral family history that survives is the history that was purposely and accurately passed on. The history that was assumed to be safe, assumed to have more time, is the history that becomes, within three generations, silence.

The lola of a Filipino family knows things that are not written down in any library, archived in any government office, or stored in any database. She knows them the way all oral knowledge is known: in the body, in the daily practice, in the language of a specific place and time. She is, in the most literal sense available to us, irreplaceable. And she is, like all living things, temporary. What we do with the time that remains — whether we sit with her and ask, whether we record what she says, whether we treat her knowledge as the inheritance it actually is — is the only question that still has an answer.

Avril Shakira Villar is a writer from the Philippines. She is the author of I Live Because I Almost Died and an alumna of WriteGirl LA. She is the winner of the One Room One Hour essay competition by Jack Wieland, the First Place winner in the English category of the 7th Heritage Youth Writing Contest, and one of the finalists in the English Poetry category of the 2025 Maningning Miclat Art Foundation competition. Her pieces appear in Adi Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, Deceleration News, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, Renard Press, and other literary magazines.