There are people whose faces remain clear while everything they said has dissolved.

What lasts is arbitrary. You can hold a face precisely, the exact expression, the way they held their head, and have nothing at all of what they said, though at the time the words were the entire relationship. Different kinds of memory decay at different rates, and the visual often outlives the verbal by a long way.

If someone is still reachable, write down one thing they say. If they are not, the face you have kept is not a poor consolation prize, it is what remained. Whatever survives of a person is worth treating as sufficient rather than partial.