By the time I was born, both of my grandfathers had been gone for many years. My paternal grandmother died when I was a year old and my maternal grandmother turned 80 when I was a toddler. I believe she’d understood English fully, and likely spoke it well in younger years but, by the time I was born, she’d given it up. She’d speak in Yiddish or a heavily accented English I didn’t understand and I lived in fear that I’d be in a room alone with her and she would talk to me and expect a response!

Grandparents were not part of my life experience. My dad, who clearly adored his mother, often spoke about her and how much she would have loved us, how much she would have enjoyed or liked to have been a part of some event or other, how much she would have done to enrich our lives. Whether it was “Your grandmother would have been so proud” or “Nobody made (insert just about any special food) the way my mother did,” there was always the sense of something missing, someone missing, the whole never quite being whole.

I remember thinking, as a kid, that if I was going to have children I would have them young. I would have them when they could have and know this grandparent relationship I never knew. It sounded almost magical to me and I would look at the one photo my dad had, of a rather serious-looking woman with my dad’s blue eyes, and wonder about her and about what she truly would have been like and what role she would have played in my life.

As we all know too well, life does not always follow the path we have planned. In fact, I might be more accurate if I said that it rarely does. I married at 21 and my children soon arrived but my mother was not there to see them. Breast cancer defined her fate and she died when my oldest was just over a year, my dad a few years later. All that I’d imagined, this special bond, the joy my child and my parents would share, well, it was a dream that never became reality.

I never told my own children that I wished their grandparents were there, never shared the “if only” thoughts I had. They know some stories, they know that there are certain things that I have that once belonged to my parents. But, while they may have felt a hole where a grandparent relationship might have been, it was not a conversation or a topic.

Today we have the gift of being grandparents. And, thankfully, young and healthy grandparents. We can do things with the kids, have sleepovers and holidays and special events. We can stand on the soccer field and cheer and we can phone or FaceTime or write “old fashioned letters” to maintain that connection. We are privileged and we are blessed.

I am profoundly grateful for that opportunity, to be a part of their lives, and to, one day I hope, be a memory for each of them that has meaning and maybe brings a smile. I see and understand the continuity that this grandparent/grandchild relationship can create, the flow of knowledge and stories, traditions and history, from generation to generation. What a miracle it is when we greet a newly born baby. It feels like an even greater miracle when that baby is born to our own baby. How truly the gifts of one generation to the next fill and refill our hearts.