Life may offer you a guidebook, but the pages are blank -- you have to fill them out as you go. With that in mind, we are featuring stories this week about the challenges of caring for our aging parents and it's hitting closer to home than I ever imagined. I just returned to Washington, D.C., after a week in Redmond, Wash., a suburb of Seattle. I'd gone out there to help my 81-year-old Dad through a tough surgery and I only had a few days to get him home from the hospital and make sure he was safe and comfortable before I had to take the cross-country trip back. While at the hospital, in the grocery checkout, or in line at the pharmacy, I saw others just like me —- adult children or other caretakers doing what they could to help out an aging parent. Assisting a frail parent walk, leaning in to hear a dry whisper of a voice, chuckling over some shared family memory -- these are scenes repeated hundreds if not thousands of times each day in this country.

We arrived in Oregon last Thursday to follow Bob around, capturing everything this extraordinarily active man does. The camera crew and I were hard pressed to keep up with him. Ann joined us on Saturday for our interview. We squeezed around the dining room table and settled in for a conversation. Ann and her father have the kind of relationship where it seems they've never stopped talking. They discussed everything: love, loss, learning, what it's like getting older, and how to keep one's zest for life.

If there's one thing I'd like to see people take away from this series of reports, it's this: Do what Ann did. Sit down with your parent or parents, set up a video camera and start talking. Don't do it around a holiday, when there are presents or other distractions. Do it for no other reason than to get them on the record - both the stories you've heard a thousand times, and the things they'll tell you that will surprise you. It might feel strange, but eventually you'll all forget the camera is there. And don't wait.