A Different View with Dave O’Connell

What a poorer place the world would be without grandparents, the glue that keeps the family together – and the caring hand that keeps the show on the road.

They come to mind because this Friday is Grandparents’ Day, but truthfully every day should be, because they are the generation that provide icing on the family cake.

I never knew any of my four grandparents, because they had all died before I was born, and my own boys only knew one set of grandparents because my own parents were gone before they arrived.

But what we lacked in quantity, we more than made up for in quality. The in-laws didn’t just provide critical help with all of life’s practical problems; they were beacons of kindness to light up the darkest of days.

The best compliment you could pay them was that going to see them was never a visit, because theirs was an extension of your own family home.

And when they minded the boys – as they did for the children of every single one of their sons and daughters – it was never out of any sense of obligation; it was done from pure love.

Tom is now gone to his reward and Kay is in a nursing home with dementia, so she doesn’t always know her own – but her face still lights up every time one or a group of the grandkids comes to see her.

Nobody is quite sure if she knows them or she just likes seeing them, but every so often, through the fog of her illness, she’ll quietly speak their names, just so you know what she knows after all.

There was a time when grandparents remained true to the caricature; two grey-haired old people sitting in comfortable armchairs drinking tea and talking about the good old days for as long as you let them.