The Grand Life: Wholehearted Grandparenting

Dealing with the Pandemic has triggered some hard questions for Emily that are bigger than grandparenting. Older people have a tougher time recovering from COVID-19 infection, making our futures a bit more uncertain. Emily is asking: are we living lives well-lived? And what can change at this late hour? She interviews a filmmaker, a researcher, and a young parent with perspectives and riveting stories about grandparents who have lived well.

RESOURCES

Skye Bergman's film is Lives Well Lived: www.lives-well-lived.com . Receive her newsletter by writing to [email protected] . You can buy the DVD , share your own stories, and see other films of hers:  Motchitsuki (password: Mochi) and Forever Voters: Making A Change One Vote At a Time.  

Emily cites this article in The Indiana Lawyer commemorating the passing of attorney Larry Reuben in 2015.

The Stretch It Takes (Emily's essay):
Searching For Meaning

COVID has really changed the trajectory of so many of our lives. Before COVID, most of us were moving in a specific direction with very clear goals and hopes and dreams. We were busy, sometimes too busy. Now it feels like we are each floating in a very small pool with nothing to do but doggie paddle. My arms are tired. How about you? I question myself almost \every day. Am I making the most of this life? Have the choices I’ve already made make it impossible for me to change direction if I don’t like the way things are going? Can I be a better self and offer that to my adult children and grandchildren? If this week was my last week on earth would it be said of me, as it has of others, that I led a well-lived life?

I think I have come up with a few answers. I would love to hear yours, but for the meantime, let me share what comes to mind. I’m thinking there are a few important things to remember in order to live well.

Know yourself  - we’ve talked about this several times in the podcast, but most notably on the episode about Enneagrams. In this episode we learned that knowing yourself is the first step to making peace with the world and your adult children. It also provides you with some wisdom to pursue healthy relationships with your grands. 

Pursue your passion - there is a lot to be said for being a doting, devoted and passionate grandparent and perhaps you have made that your passion. But try to remember that grandchildren grow up in the same way your own children did. We have seen in so many episodes that hobbies and passions are important to pursue as we grow older. It gives us a way to give back to people, and that is always life-giving. 

Work hard - It’s easy to get lazy as we grow older Both physically and mentally.  And there’s certainly nothing wrong with leisurely mornings and quiet evenings. But hard work is a way to stay useful and young! Try not to shy away from doing the hard things, learning something new, taking a chance and falling. 

Stay relevant - resist the urge to look at the future in a negative way. You can still appreciate the past without damning the future. Explore what is predicted and what is present. Attempt to look forward...even in conversation. It’s important to say YES to what is to come and reserve NO in conversation only when absolutely necessary or when you feel your boundaries are being ignored. 

The older people I most love and admire are people who exhibit these traits. They are young at heart and fun to be around. They have stretched themselves and stayed flexible. They do not have to search for meaning because they have actually found it.  I guarantee that none of them have perfect lives, but instead, they have lives well lived. That’s the goal. That’s the challenge.
--(c) 2020 Emily Morgan

Emily wraps up Season Four with personal stories from her recent guests about sleepovers with their grandparents. There's a wide range of experiences, and you may find your own echoed among them. Also, sit in on a "board meeting" with Emily and producer/husband Mike that maps out some neat changes ahead for The Grand Life.

EPISODE NOTES

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• Write a REVIEW of the podcast in your podcast app, which is separate from RATING. If you liked it, say why. If you didn't, let us know so we can get better.

Emily and her husband/producer Mike chat about the recent live video episode on cooking with grands (replay here on YouTube). Also, a listener provides a guest essay for "The Stretch It Takes" on a grand camp that included cooking, with cool ideas on what you can do for your own.

The recipes for our cooking live video show are here.

John and Patty, Two Chefs In The Kitchen, do a twice-monthly live cooking show on the streaming video service Beamz--you can sign up for their free series here.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Grandparenting has evolved from three generations ago when we, as grandparents, were grandchildren. Where we live, where our grands live, who travels, how often--the expectations are not the same. What is the one factor that had changed grandparenting the most? Explore this with Emily Morgan and her friend Mickey, whose pipe-smoking grannny makes for a great story.

Also in Episode 1:

• Relationship Yoga: Send The Letter
• Passing On Your Passions: Making Space for Gatherings
• Great Works for Your Grands: "The Duel" by Eugene Field

Send The Letter (Emily's essay)

Just recently my grandmother died. We believed she was one year shy of her 103rd birthday when she passed away, but when we went the Register of Wills, her paperwork confirmed she had been born 2 years earlier. So, in that reality she was one day shy of her 105th birthday. That’s a long life. And I would like to say it was a long life well- lived, but in all honesty, I was quite removed from her life and couldn’t say either way. 

Later, going through her papers, I was keenly aware of how little I knew my grandparents. I grew up a 10-hour drive away from that set of grandparents. We visited occasionally, maybe once a year, and I don’t remember them ever traveling to visit us. They would send us a Christmas and birthday card with a $5 check. The connection to my grandparents was fairly transactional, to say the least. 

That was why I was surprised, that in one of the piles on her kitchen table, I discovered a note from her written to me and tucked into a card I had sent her when I was a young adult. It read something like “Thank you for the fruit and for thinking of me,” Love, Nana. It was very short, matter of fact and not very newsy. But I recognized her handwriting, and the word love was used.

Had I received that note in the mail right after it was written, I’m pretty sure I would have been so grateful to get it and see those words.  You see, as an adult, I ordered and sent my grandparents Harry and David fruit every year for years. After my grandfather died, I continued to send fruit and other gifts to my grandmother. I did it partly out of love and partly out of respect for their position in my life as my grandparents. But I never heard back except through my mother who talked to her mother and relayed the message that they got the fruit and appreciated it. It felt like an awkward dispassionate exchange. A gift purchased by me, given to my grandparents, and acknowledged through an intermediary.

 I felt a pang when I saw the thank you note…my first thought was I had judged harshly and that my grandmother had every intention of reaching out and sending her love in that thank you note. Maybe she couldn’t find a stamp, or it took all she could to just write the letter (she was struggling with Macular Degeneration, I knew).  Maybe she thought she had sent the letter…like she thought she was 103, not 105. All those things could be true. 

But let me encourage you all out there who are now grandparents: send the letter.

It’s easy to believe that your small gestures as a grandparent are not important. But they are. You are the elder. You set the bar. You are the model of what it is to love and to pursue. I see so many grandparents who sit back and wait to be loved by their children and grandchildren. Consider being the one who takes the initiative. There is a lot to lose if you simply keep forgetting to do the little things. Please…just send the letter.

(c) 2019 Emily Morgan

Emily speaks with author Molly Beth Griffin, author of Ten Beautiful Things, a children's book which deals with helping a grand develop a sense of gratitude in a tough time. Emily's essay explores how and why her gratitude has ebbed and flowed over her lifetime.

EPISODE NOTES

The author's web site is www.mollybethgriffin.com.

THE STRETCH IT TAKES (Emily's essay):
Enjoy the Stillness

  There have been some periods of my life when I’ve been more grateful than others. And the more I consider the reasons for that, I believe that it has to do with how much cushion I have around my life. We’ve talked a little about the difference between being thankful and being grateful. It’s easy to express thanks. And I think for the most part I have been thankful to others for the things I enjoy. But the deeper things...the real feelings of gratitude have always come with a generous amount of time to reflect on them. 

  Like my mother’s square yellow casserole dish as she pulled it out of the oven, filled with a boiling hot spring of homemade mac and cheese. There was nothing like the feeling of receiving the first spoonful of that bubbling, cheesy pasta. I was always grateful if I was served that spoonful before anyone else. 

   As a child, my gratitude extended to being handed the cold, sweaty pink aluminum cup of KoolAid from my grandmother’s kitchen, or inhaling the scent of New Hampshire pine needles when I walked hand in hand with my grandfather to the mailbox to get the morning paper.

  My first ten years were spent living in a cement subdivision where driveways and sidewalks took up the majority of that Buffalo landscape. On sweltering hot days, my friends and I would soak our beach towels with water and then lay down on them after skipping back and forth through the sprinkler. When it was time for dinner, we would pull them off the steamy cement underneath. I still remember the velcro-like sound of my towel as I ripped it off the driveway. Strange things to feel gratitude for. Strange things to remember. But maybe not so strange when you think about how much time I had at that point in my life. 

  Most days, that’s all I had was time. Not a lot of agency. Not much freedom to make my own decisions. I was completely at the mercy of everyone else’s schedule, which meant that I needed to keep myself occupied. So I read books, explored home construction sites (scary thought now that I’m older), I put on talk shows with my friends, and I played house in practically everyone’s basement in the neighborhood. And so many of my feelings of gratitude are wrapped around that time of my life. The list is endless...wearing my pajamas to the ice cream stand, the rough feel of the carpet in the back of the yellow VW Beetle (a place I loved to crawl into), the box fan blowing in my face and the funny mouth noises I entertained myself with, the massive trays of donuts brought to our front door for us to point to and then consume, the smell of the lily pads at my grandparent’s lake cottage. 

  But then there’s a long space that spanned my teenage years until the years I had our babies where I have a hard time remembering anything I was really grateful for. Jr. High, High School, College and then grad school, new jobs and marriage. So was I newly ungrateful, or was I just busy?

  A lot happened during that time, but my most memorable moment of gratitude happened when as an adult and a new mother I was sitting out on the upstairs screened porch of our home in Rochester, NY. We had moved there when our daughter was one, and in the next spring our son was born. I sat out on the porch many late nights, nursing him and rocking him to sleep. I had nothing but time on my hands. No agency really. Not much freedom. Lots of hours at home with a 21-month-old and a newborn. Time had once again stopped for me, and in that pause, I was beyond grateful. I rocked my baby and watched the lights flicker below in the neighborhood. It was quiet. And I was filled with gratitude. 

  But before I knew it, I was in the throes of mothering four children all the way from birth to college. Looking back, it’s a blur, a...