Some nights I dream I ring at my grand-parents’ door. When they open, I feel so excited, so happy, that I can’t prevent me from falling in their arms. This time is so quiet, so peaceful and soft that some tears drops roll on my face: I feel so happy to meet them again! I realize how much I missed them, how much their death has been a suffering to me. Just a few phrases exchanged together, some cuddles, and a nice word to comfort me as “we’re very happy up there, very busy too! Don’t be sad for us.” Then they disappear as they came up, in a soft blow. Generally I wake up crying and I shout out loud: “Grandpa, grandma: come back!”
Then, during a few days after that dream, I usually can feel their presence as kind ghosts hanging me around, whispering some words of encouragement and confidence. So I feel fine next, but their words and their image haunt me a very long time after my dream of them.
From that time of childhood and later when I’ve been older even, I miss everything: our cuddles, our conversations, our dreams, and almost all every single little thing made together, each of their smiles, attitude or little habit. I miss their old-age, their fragility and their vulnerability that reminded me how much they needed protection from us, their family. I miss their look at me so tender, so nice, so indulgent and tolerant.
When “the time of grandmothers” as I like to call it, goes away, you can say you’re on a new way of your life, far from your innocent childhood. You became your family’s new generation of adults.
So now, I’ve noticed my parents get this nice way of being, so I can measure how much they are precious to me, as my grandparents were before them. How much their love is important. How much I’ve got a thousand things to learn from them yet, from their experience of life. They’re fragile and need my presence more than in the past. They want me to talk to them what I’m living day after day: they are curious, patient and careful. They save their new solitude from isolation by walking their dog many times a day: they can meet people and chat with them. They ask me to come to see them at least once a week, so I find that as a special time: I can be myself, a true myself with them, after a day spent playing a role at work; I can take off my high heels and have a cup of a delicious tea with them. As I did with my grandparents many years ago, I love to chat with them, to look at them as if it was the first time. I find out a new little habit, a new dash of humour. Sometimes they complain, but not for a long time because they don’t want to bore me, nor to intoxicate me with their issues. But the main reason is they’re scared I wouldn’t come back over: I’m one of their two daughters, so they need me as they need my sister.
As I remind the rebel and revolted teenager I’ve been, all these crises spent carrying on wars against them, and then I compare the parents they’ve been and the grandparents they are with my children, I can notice they have changed a lot between these two eras. They haven’t been the same. When I look back, I just can let the past be a part of them they’re not anymore. A side of life we can’t make it happen again: we’re not the same people we’ve been.
Sometimes I wonder what kind of grandmother I’ll be when that time comes over if ever my life lasts up to that day. Will my kids say the same: that I’ve been a different grandma than the mother I’ve been? Will they be nostalgic thinking to their own grandparents as I do now? Will they be afraid too, by thinking they’re going to become the new adults of our family? What kind of dreams will they get? Will their grandparents come back in their dreams too, to give them a cuddle? Will they have some tears?
Will they come back home from time to time when I’m a grandma? Will they find a time for me? What can I do to make them be careful later?
So many questions and no answers yet… meanwhile, I go back to my parents’ and become again their little daughter, at least once a week. That’s Happiness!
Love,
Jane