When I was younger, I don’t think I connected with my grandparents. I loved them, and they loved me, it is an unconditional,  less complicated love, but there wasn’t much deep discussion. When my Grandma died a few years back, it was a wake-up call. We were so much the same.  I can trace my very self back to her, pretty much the only two creative folk on either side of my extended families. We were so very much the same that it was like we had trouble communicating because we were too busy mirroring each other. I didn’t spend enough time with her. Not deeply. Not enough.

I am finally of an age where I am less of a self-centered A hole, and more interested in spending time with my grandparents, hearing whatever it is they have to say, because 90% of it is relevant and fascinating, and probably only 10% about birds and your love life and Austria and bread. Case in point: chatted with my granddad on my Dad’s side last night. At 86 years young he is still working, as one of the top child psychiatrists in the country, currently still helping change mental health policy in NC. I asked him what, if anything, worries him the most these days. Does he think about death? Where he will go when he dies? His health? His answer: “The older I get, I worry that I’m not as effective as I used to be.  I compare myself to others. I Fall in the upper 10 percent of psychiatrists. I worry that I will slip to 12.” Oh, granddad, do you mean the very thing that I spend a lot of time worrying about and torturing myself with, whether or not I’m doing my very best or enough? By which you mean we are very much related and here is tangible proof of how I am very much your granddaughter and it is so beautiful and weird that you shaped me or passed something down to me that I sometimes perceive as a flaw but is perhaps what has motivated to get where I am today (which is somewhere, though I sometimes tell myself it’s not far enough?) If you still can, talk to them, while you can. If nothing else, for the context of You.