I resisted the ridiculous urge to tell Jacob that his grandfather was still his grandfather. What could that possibly mean to him? My father was an abstraction, an ancestor to him—nothing more. All those stories, the tallis, the sepia photographs scattered around our house of the little boy in the bowler hat—those were important to me. But they held no more of a sense of reality for my son than the fables and fairy tales I’d read to him when he was a child.
I feel this way about my daughter’s relationship with my parents. She barely remembers my mom, and my dad passed away a month before I became pregnant with her. So even if I were to try to help her maintain her sense of self as their descendant…really, she probably doesn’t even have one! She knows who they are because of photos on my walls, and she knows how much I miss them. But they aren’t real to her the way they are to me.
