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Letter to Grand Children: A 2020 blog post never published until 2024

Yesterday I awoke with this very same idea being as my wife and I live here 'in the middle of nowhere' away from all the rest of our immediate family; the threat of contacting and spreading Covid, a further isolating experience, making things terribly worse especially during holiday periods and birthdays.

The wife stays in contact with our children, and grandchildren via Facebook/FaceTime, etc; occasional texts, and emails but, the way I see it, most of it is small talk with little substantive exchange of information, something I lament because their aging mother's/grandmother's, once-illustrative life is little known among them. I foresee regret on their parts for not asking her about herself NOW; born in 1944, what was her childhood like?; who were her her parents? Her siblings? What did she think of as a young girl. Where did she go to school? What was it like to raise four children all under the age of five? Learn the story of her life as only she can tell it before its too late.

We get caught up in the immediate in the headlong rush of our lives, and don't think to ask the elders about theirs, thinking or not thinking that they'll always be there until they're not; then later by chance or design, learn something about them that was unknown, then painfully realize their woeful failure to ask them when they had the opportunity.

Comments

Joe - Wednesday's Child said…
Couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, social media are isolating our children from pretty much all forms of healthy, intimate relationship.
May 3, 2024 at 8:04 AM
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