The Grandparents I Can Still See When I Close My Eyes

Hi, friends. A few days ago, a friend and I went to see the movie "Ach, diese entsetzliche Lücke." You might not have heard of it, since it's a German film. It's based on the wonderful book by Joachim Meyerhoff, and Senta Berger and Bruno Alexander play the leads. The story follows a young man searching for his own path. It's about grief, and above all it's about his relationship with his grandparents, who take him in when he moves to study acting.

Near the end of the movie, several years after his grandparents have died, the young man says (I can only give this from memory) that no matter how long they've been gone, his memories of them don't fade. All he has to do is close his eyes and he can bring them back.

Those lines really got to me, because it's exactly the same for me. I was very close to my grandparents on my mom's side. The ninth anniversary of my grandmother's death is coming up soon, and still, nothing has faded.

I can see her so clearly, standing in her lightly striped housedress, frying schnitzel for us. She never used the dishwasher and always washed everything by hand. We kids weren't allowed to help. We were supposed to go lie down in the living room and rest (which, with our bellies stuffed full, we were of course happy to do).

My grandma's fridge held things my mother would never have bought (Babybel cheese and Actimel yogurt drinks, for example). She loved her German TV soaps, first Lindenstraße and later Sturm der Liebe. She gave the most sensational back scratches and foot massages, and she told gripping stories. I could have listened for hours to how she fled the Russians after the war, how she had to sleep in barns and beg farmers for bread. When the refugee crisis reached Germany, she was completely shaken for days, because it brought back so many memories.

She was always slipping us money and saying, "It doesn't hurt me, and it'll do you good." As kids, we were totally creeped out when she took out her dentures at night and they floated in a glass next to the bathroom sink.

Sometimes, when I can't sleep these days, I walk through my grandparents' little apartment in my mind. The wallpaper from the 1970s stayed up until the very end, which made the place strangely colorful. I remember every tiny detail. I know exactly how I used to hop up the stairs to their door. She never stood in the doorway, she always just left the door open a crack, because of course she was at the stove making food.

For me, the relationship with my grandparents was completely different from the one with my parents. You don't butt heads with grandparents, you don't really think they're lame, you don't rebel against them. Just as my grandparents never thought I was lame and never really tried to raise me. There was only ever this flood of affection.

The generation of my grandparents is almost gone, and sometimes I'm scared that their life stories will die with them. Most of them had truly intense stories, and we should listen to them more often.

I think one of the greatest gifts of my childhood was getting to grow up so close to my grandparents. And I feel just like the young man in the movie: whenever I miss them, I close my eyes and go to them.