What makes a grandparent relationship?

Reflections on interview with Brit Stueven

Photo by Ekaterina Shakharova on Unsplash

Of the many ways I related to

Brit Stueven

in her wonderful interview last week—including being a study-rocks-while-the-other-kids-kickball type—our Grandma Dorothy connection struck me most. Brit’s Grandma Dorothy had a band in Denver and played piano like no other and wore glitzy sweaters. Mine was an Iowa farm girl and mother of five who, in mid-life, began teaching high schoolers and taking white-water rafting trips. Both inspired us to live less restrained lives.

What makes a grandparent relationship the kind you tell a friend about years later? I’ve been writing about grandparent relationships in my novel, so this question has been top of mind. I’ve also been listening to the Wiser than Me podcast with Julia Louis-Dreyfus—which, if you haven’t listened, you should. Julia interviews older, iconic women about things like what they’d tell their younger selves and how old they feel. How many 70+-year-old women’s voices do you hear on air these days? These women are overflowing with unpretentious wisdom. They are delighting in their older age. And at the end of each episode, Julia calls her own 89-year-old mom. Their close and gushing relationship is one of my favorite things about the show.  

I have this idea that we don’t treasure older people the way past generations did. Maybe no generation ever did as much as they should. But the smartphone age doesn’t do us any favors. It favors young people who like to learn new technologies. Neither does our “youth obsessed” culture that tries to avert its eyes to death, as death doula Alua Arthur talked about in her beautiful recent interview with

Jane Ratcliffe

.

For some of us, it’s not a grandparent who comes to mind. It might be a favorite teacher, or a person we met volunteering at a retirement home. These relationships often happen on the sidelines of books and movies. We see them in the opening scenes or in the background of a love story. They are rarely the focus. But they can be some of the juiciest parts of our lives—particularly when it comes to creative inspiration.

This might be because it’s easier to be unleashed when you get older, and unleashed people are inspiring. My Grandma Dorothy was that way. She wasn’t the performer that Brit’s grandma was. But she had her own way of shimmying. She gave direct answers. She went on adventures. She could command a room—and did any time we were all together.

It wasn’t the amount of time I spent with my Grandma Dorothy that made our relationship what it was, although time certainly helps. It wasn’t any advice she gave or activity we did. Simple as it sounds, it was the way she made me feel.

Be bold. Find your joy. Make your own life beautiful—no one else can do it for you. She said all of these things without ever saying them. I don’t even know that she ever realized all of her dreams herself. But oh, she wanted me to. I felt it in the quickness of her “yes!” In the way she showed me her favorite objects found in her travels and put them back just so. In the way her fingers danced on the table.