Thursday Th(ink)s - June 18, 2026

The Hidden Cost of Loving Grandchildren

Here we are at Thursday once again—the place where yesterday is longer than tomorrow and wisdom is often disguised as a story.

Each week I sit down to reflect on these Thursday years, this final third of life, and the surprising things they continue to teach me. Thank you for coming along. Aging has turned out to be a richer subject than I ever imagined, and Thursday always gives us something worth thinking about.

Let’s dive in…

It’s been some years now since I discovered that grief and love share the same path. They journey to the house of mourning together, sometimes walking side by side, sometimes one taking the lead, then the other.

You go first. Now it’s your turn to lead.

Yet they always arrive together because grief and love are inseparable. They hold hands and say, “Because of you, I know I am human. Let’s enter the dwellings of both joy and sorrow together.”

My induction into the house of grief came when my Danish grandmother died. My Bedstemor.

I was unprepared.

The night before, she had been shelling peas on the back porch beside Bedstefar, singing hymns in Danish and humming her way through a bowl of freshly picked pods. The next day she was dead. Her heart simply said, “All finished here,” and stopped beating.

A friend came to the fabric department at Hudson’s Bay, where I was working, and said, “I just saw an ambulance in front of your grandparents’ house.”

I slipped behind the cash desk and called the farm. No answer.

Then I looked up and saw my sister-in-law coming down the escalator. Our eyes met. I knew why she was there. And why there was no answer at the farm.

And then...

I don’t remember much after that. Love filled every corner of me while grief took my hand and led me into a place I’d never been before. That house that’s shrouded in shadow, where the blinds are drawn, and the hearth is cold. The house of heartache.

I was eighteen, freshly home from a year in Europe, with another adventure waiting somewhere beyond the horizon. Wanderlust was already tugging at my sleeve.

And then, for the first time, grief interrupted my plans and said, “follow me,” and I did. I learned through grief how deeply I had loved. I hadn’t known.

Which brings me to last Monday.

Hubs and I joined our daughter, her husband, and his dad and stepmom for our granddaughters’ Pre-K and Kindergarten graduations. There we sat in a row: six adults watching two little girls clutch certificates and wear those oversized, self-conscious smiles children wear when they know everyone is looking at them.

What those girls don’t yet know is that one of us grandparents will likely be their induction into the house of grief.

The love they are gathering now will one day be measured by the grief they feel then.

I already grieve that future grief. But I can’t protect them from it; instead, I am feeding into it by loving them so deeply.

And isn’t that the price of love?

Yes.

Without love, grief is despair without a home. With love, grief becomes a holy place—a sacred room where two gifts given to humanity dwell together in perfect unity: love and grief.

I blubbered through both graduations.

My love for these girls—and for their brother, who had his own moving-on-up ceremony last year—is deeper than words. And I sense the same from them. When our eyes meet, something passes between us that no one else can quite understand.

It’s Bedste love.

Grandmother love.

One of the sweetest gifts of old age.

I never expected to be a mother, nor a grandmother. Perhaps that’s why I cry so easily.

Love keeps finding me.

And now, at this age, it seems to know exactly where I live.

Thanks be to God.

Big Brains: “By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe.” ― Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

Old Souls: “The very old and the very young have something in common that makes it right that they should be left alone together. Dawn and sunset see stars shining in a blue sky; but morning and midday and afternoon do not, poor things.” ― Elizabeth Goudge

The Ancient of Days: “Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins.” -1 Peter 4:8

NJ Quote:
“One of the sweetest gifts of old age is loving people so deeply 
that you cry at kindergarten graduations.”

Thursday Chat: Nobody tells you that old age comes with a built-in heartbreak. Is love worth it? Yes. Our yesterdays have been so filled with love that it leaks into tomorrow and slips out through our eyes as it passes by. May it ever be so.