Time spent with Grandma and Grandpa is always bittersweet.
Today, I got together with Charlie, Steven and Cecilia and had a socially distant lunch outside with Grandma and Grandpa. For an entire year now, every time our families got together, grandma and grandpa would be missing at our dinner table. For Chinese New Years this year, I just couldn’t bear to think about them eating alone.
My grandparents’ apartment complex has a public courtyard area that recently opened up, so we set up a socially distanced lunch. We updated each other on our lives and discussed our hopes for the future. We asked grandma and grandpa about the past, what it was like growing up for when they were young. As we were cleaning up, I felt a lump creeping up in my throat. Grandpa had asked twice for us to stay a little longer. It pained me to think about how long they had looked forward to a gathering like this one.
During the drive back home I thought about how many more questions I had about their past and how I had a very finite amount of time to get to know them as humans. But also how happy I was to have intimately connected with during a time where intimacy is hard to foster.
