Listen To Your Grandparents’ Story Before It’s Too Late
Listening to old people’s stories can teach us valuable lessons about our lives
Early last week I visited a Shiva (a week long mourning period following a loved one’s death in Jewish tradition) of an old family member.
A Shiva is not a happy event to attend, but a moment after stepping into the house I was greeted happily and was promised a precious gift!
“Come, come, we found photos of your mother! come get them”.
Naturally I rushed in with a huge excited smile and spark in my eyes.
My mom died when she was 50 and any new photo of her would be a treat.
We sat together and browsed through the black and white photos and with each one I lost a heart beat — “is this her? maybe she’s in the next one?”
Then we reached a photo of my mom in her wedding dress, a day I saw in photos but not this one, and it was exciting.
I continued automatically to find more treasures as this one and reached photos of my grandfather. He looked young and happy, it was wonderful.
But the real event was finding photos of my grandmother whom I am named after, a woman I have never met.
I saw her in no more than two photos and the only image I have of her is in black and white, an old woman, nothing that made me curious as a girl about her story and who she was.
But in these new photos she has black hair and looks vital. In one photo, printed in color, she is hugging my grandfather and looks happy. Her leg is showing and she looks great. This photo was a true gift that made me curious who this woman was. I knew she died of Alzheimer and heard very few stories about her from my mom — how she took her daughter to piano lessons and bribed her with a carrot juice each week, someone told me she had a beautiful voice back in the village she grew up in, and I remember the very sad story of how my mom chose a wedding dress alone since her mom was already sick.
Nothing in this color photo reveals this tragic ending of her life. It is a happy moment in time captured on film. But what was she thinking about, what was she planning for her next vacation with her husband or for next year? What made her worry or laugh?
In this photo her sleeves are long so there’s no evidence of her tattooed number from Auschwitz — a story I only once heard from my grandfather in his later years. But I was a young child and listening to Holocaust stories was just too much. And then it was too late.
