When do promises expire?

I am in the strange position of possessing more of my father’s artifacts than my own. When he passed, I tried to piece together the parts of his story I didn’t know from items he left behind, and among them was his high school yearbook. It held many handwritten inscriptions, but there was one in particular. She’d written it by her portrait, and it spilled out onto the margins of the page. She invited my father to reach out anytime, no matter how many years had passed. After he and my mother divorced, we lost touch, and only reconnected a few years before he died. So I don’t know, and will never know, if he ever did reach out to her. I remember getting a similar inscription from a high school classmate. Not a generic “hey, let’s stay in touch”—her words had a similar gravity to what my father’s classmate had written. Like the passage of time and change of circumstances will not matter. I’ll always want to hear from you. You write in people’s yearbooks at times of transition and…