Grandparents: On the periphery of family life

When I first became a grandmother, I excitedly joined class reunions and compared notes about grandchildren with my high school classmates who also became lolas. Each of us brought out “brag books” filled with photos of our grandchildren.

Today, my eldest grandchild, Cyrus, is 28-years-old, a pharmacy sales department head in Los Angeles while my youngest is 11-years-old Dominique who is an incoming Grade 6 student.

Grandchildren’s special love for grandparents

There is the observation that grandparents and grandchildren get along more harmoniously than parents and children. Grandchildren look for comfort and unconditional love when they are young, and as grandparents we can give it to them because we are not directly responsible for them.

We can see them for what they are because we are not pressured by what we think they ought to be. We can enjoy their growth because we have gained the perspective of how fleeting childhood is. When we were parents, living with it day by day childhood seemed to go on forever.

We can befriend their adolescence because of the more relaxed attitude toward conventions and outward demands that we have acquired. We may even find them turning to us for some of our old-fashioned thoughts to guide them. We can provide a “haven of peace and rest” for them, and perhaps for our children too, who are caught up in the responsibilities of middle life. A marvelous, warm place waits for us on the “periphery of family life.” All that it asks of us is to live along gently into it, aware of its promises and possibilities.

J’Aime la jeunesse (i love youth)

A decade ago, I delighted in the company of our high school and college students, who suddenly transformed to the peak of their physical beauty. I knew most of them since they started school in kindergarten. Ugly ducklings turned into swans.

Like the British governess in Anna and the King of Siam, I cannot help but sing to myself, whenever I see these students pairing with each other – “Hello young lovers, whoever you are, I hope your troubles are few. All my good wishes go with you tonight, I’ve been in love like you… “

Yet youth has plenty of problems to meet and decisions to make, although they have a pervading aura of peace, however temporary. Youth, above all, is full of life, “the precious uncertain fire of life” burning without thought — unaware and so unconscious of its own beauty.

“J’aime la jeunesse” (I love youth), Olga Lamkert used to say. Yes it is true. This is a gift that its owners are unaware of, or if they thought about it at all, thought of as part of themselves, not as the temporary loan that it is. We do not live life, life lives us. 

Bernard Shaw once said that youth is wasted on the young. It is true in more sense than he may have intended. Wasted because it is misused; wasted because it is not appreciated as the gift of health, strength, and energy; wasted because the young are unaware of the clear beauty that is theirs for the time. Perhaps it is only the old, looking on, who can see that beauty. Perhaps that is one of the gifts of old age.

Seeking the lost and legendary treasure

The chances to enjoy the beauty of youth depend greatly upon whether or not the young enjoy being with the old. We must cherish the wonder of how the elderly live their lives. How are these patriarchs whom one seeks out? Most are self-made people who have accumulated golden experiences for decades from which the young can learn. During his courtship days, my husband Max preferred to sit down first with Don Manuel, my handsome Spanish-mestizo grandpa. He would challenge Max in Spanish narrating the combats as a revolutionary captain in the Battle of Guadalupe. Yes, they are people who seem to feel at home with themselves and with the world around them. Their anecdotes traverse several generations they love to recount.  They are people who have become complete in themselves in some enviable, hard-to-grasp way.

Mary C. Morrison, author of “Let Evening Come: Reflections on Aging” knew an old woman who gained fame among the younger relatives because they would have to read the New York Times the morning before they went to see her, if they wanted to keep up their end of the conversation. She would want to know what they thought about all the new and interesting things that were happening in the world. She did a crossword puzzle daily, as an athletic person might go to a fitness center.

These easy-to-visit elders are more interested in the lives of their visitors than in their own. They want to hear what the young are doing and reading and thinking. They would tend to dwell not on problems but on what life offers that is promising and lively. There is a refreshing agility in their thinking. In their opinion, they seem almost to have graduated from morality, and they look at each situation presented to them on its own individual merits – seen on the light of its own integrity and that of the person presenting it. They offer peace and perspective, and a warm welcoming place that the young find restful, and that they come to seek, as one would seek a lost and legendary treasure.

Write your memoirs– a treasure trove

People often deplore the tendency of the old to live in the past, and sometimes it is deplorable. But it can be very good since this period requires the harvesting of the past in memory, in thought, and in writing.

Minnie, my high school classmate in St. Scholastica’s College, became a social worker and worked in New York where she met her American husband, Jim Martin. I stayed with them in their lovely house in Ventura, California. Once a week, they would attend a writing class for senior citizens. After a month, a book of 18 memoirs was compiled by them and their classmates complete with nostalgic photos of past generations. Her husband’s hidden talent for watercolor portraits was also developed in another class.

Each of us can have at least one volume of memoirs stored away in our hearts and minds. It is time to look at the whole in perspective and garner wisdom from it. Our memories can be a treasure trove for our children and younger friends. 

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