Both my granddaughters turned 7 in the last three months. For a birthday gift I created story books on their first 7 years of life. My goal was to let them know how very special they are in my life. It sounds simple however, each book took hours to compile. Collecting the photos, putting them in an order that made sense. One book was more show and tell, the other more stories. Both tried to convey the feeling of my heart when I think of them.  Not an easy task really.

One grandchild is being raised in the church, so it was easy for me to talk about faith. The other is being raised very secular. For example, she has a necklace with a cross on it and when I asked her what it was she said it was a sword. Her brother thought my church shaped birdhouse was a spaceship. So, it was more of a challenge to convey, at a 7 year old level, my belief in love as a constant through the generations. It sounds simple as I just outlined it but I had to get beyond my Biblical quotation of 1 Corinthians 13 to come up with a plausible explanation for “Love never ends.”

My psyche took a bit of a deep dive as well. I wanted to talk about the people who enriched my life, without turning a 24 page picture book into a 1000 page memoir. This meant boiling things down to a very small nutshell. Again, so a 7 year old could hopefully get my drift.

As a practitioner of Conscious Aging I’m aware this isn’t a vanity project, but a deep need to leave evidence of me, and those who came before me.  As I wrote in one of the books, “I love being the person with our family stories to share and pass along to another generation. I want to give you a memory of those who came before us as a way to show their lives honour and respect.”  This thought flows from the “what’s the point” that becomes topical as I age. The point right now is I have grandchildren to share my life—past and future—with. The books are done now, and it’s time for the next project and the question, “What is important for me to do now?”