As I fill out all of this paperwork and I think over the future my husband and I will provide for our children, we find sweet moments. Last night, for instance, as I was making dinner (a ground beef cassoulet with whole wheat dumplings, yum!), John had his computer playing music on shuffle. Alanis Morrissette’s “Head Over Feet” came on, and he stopped in the process of cleaning up after me (he was helping with dinner, because he’s good like that) to catch me and smile. “We can tell our children that this was our song when we were dating.” I smiled; the man knows exactly the right things to say to tickle my romantic soul. “We can tell them this was our song, play it for them, and then forbid them from listening to the rest of the album until they’re 21,” he added, and we laughed.
It’s one of the things I’m enjoying; thinking about all the things we’ll share with our children, the future we’re going to make together with them out of little silly things. Memories, after all, aren’t only in the big decisions you make; they’re all the little things you do together as a family. It’s in sharing your favorite movies with your children, watching them discover the world for the first time and sharing that wonder.
Sadly, I’ve remembered one of the things I can’t share with my children, one of the things that is most precious in my life that I want most to share with them, I can only ever share second hand. My sweet babies will never know their grandfather. Their grandfather, who would have loved them silly, will never know them. It makes me so sad that one of my favorite people in the world will be missing from the life of my children. They will know him as the man in pictures with their mommy, they will know him as their mommy’s daddy, but he will never be a real person to them, a person they could play with, touch, hug, swing on, kiss. He will never hold them close, tuck them in, see their great accomplishments in life. They will never know him the way they will know their other grandparents or great-grandparents (an entire set of which they will not know, either, a fact which likely grieves John).
To be fair, it’s not as if their lives won’t be richer because of my father. I am the woman I am because of him; I made intentional choices to be like him, to emulate his behavior instead of other behaviors I saw. When I think about the sort of parent I want to be, his is one of the examples I think of. They will do some of the things I did when I was child because I loved when my father did them with me. They will hear stories about my sweet Daddy. When their hearts hurt and they need to know they are loved, I will draw on the example of my father and tell them they are not alone. My children will know of my Daddy. At least one of them will carry his name as a legacy to him (if not both of them). But knowing of a man and knowing him are two different things, and it is the loss of knowing him that I grieve for my children.
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