Who They Once Were.

When your parent loses a parent you see them differently.

You don't see them as the people who raised you.

You see them as children who are missing a part of who they are.

You can't put a bandage over the scrape on their heart.

You can't put a silly straw in a drink and hope it cheers them up.

You have to simply be there.

Even when they want their space.

Even when they don't say a word.

You know you lost a grandparent, a very vital part of you, but when you start seeing them as someone's parent it changes your whole perspective.

They lived a whole other life before we came along.

They lived in a whole other world, a world far different from the one we know.

And in their world came your parents who were at one point children growing and learning.

Their whole lives were in the walls that housed them and their parents put to tune to the love and laughter they shared.

Even when the years pass and they move out, that tune continues playing on inside them in all their memories.

They also get nostalgic.

They also dream of days gone by.

It isn't until you lose a grandparent that you start seeing your own parent this way.

As a kid who just wants to open the door to their childhood home and run into their parents arms again.

It's unfair that we can't treat our parents the way they have treated us growing up because there is no instruction manual.

There are no instincts for children as there are instincts for parents.

We have to simply allow them to be a child again and hold their hands for the next part of their journey.

Even during your grieving in the loss of a grandparent, it's so hard to shrink your parents down and imagine what they were like as a kid.

Even when the funeral home is decorated with old family photos. The kid version of your parent in those photos seem so different, so far away from the parent you grew up with.

Sometimes I wish I could know the child version of my parents. It would have been easier to help them through one of the hardest moments of their life. To know their childhood not just from the stories they tell but to experience it myself and carry the different versions of my parents just as my parents have carried different versions of me and their parents have carried different versions of them.

Time has passed since both of my granddad's have passed. Not a day goes by that I don't think of them. It makes me wonder how often my parents think of them as well.

Do they replay their memories like an old tape?

Do they replay conversations like an old song?

Do they create moments that never happened for a little comfort?

Do they script conversations that were never spoken to ease the silence?

Their grief is their own and they don't owe me a single thing, but I hope they know they are not alone in it.

Although we are grieving a different version of the person we lost, they don't have to sit in the silence of their grief.

They'll never have to but I will always give them their space so they can.

And so I send silent letters to the versions of my parents that I never knew in hopes that somewhere, somehow-in the timeline of this universe- it reaches the children that they used to be so they know that they have a loving future ahead of them, not just with their parents but with the children they will one day have.

Maybe somewhere in another world the children they used to be play along side the kids my siblings and I once were and we all get to grow together in the love that my grandparents gave.