BEFORE I WAS GRAMMIE, I WAS A GRANDDAUGHTER

What Our Grandparents Hand Forward Without Ever Knowing How Far It Will Travel

By Lisa Franco Alexander

Before I was Grammie, I was a granddaughter.

Long before I ever stood in a kitchen making bread with my grandchildren, there were generations of hands before mine. They prepared the foods our family knew by heart, welcomed people through the door, made things meant to last and created traditions that became so much a part of family life that nobody thought to call them traditions.

When I was a child, I didn't think my Avó was teaching me about heritage or what one generation leaves to another. I wasn't standing in her home thinking about any of that.

I was simply spending time with my grandmother, whom I adored.

It has taken growing older, becoming a mother and eventually becoming grandmother myself for me to understand how much was being handed to me during those completely ordinary days.

Before Me, There Was an Ocean

My family's story stretches back to Madeira, Portugal, where my paternal great-grandparents made a decision that would change the lives of people they would never live long enough to meet.

They left Madeira with my grandfather and his siblings and sailed across an ocean in search of a better life for their children and the generations who would follow.

I wonder sometimes what it must have taken to do that. They couldn't know exactly what waited for them, and they certainly couldn't know the names or faces of the descendants who would someday exist because they had been brave enough to go.

They couldn't have imagined me.

They couldn't have imagined my son.

And they couldn't have imagined my four grandchildren.

Yet all of us became part of the future they were willing to cross an ocean to create.

That may be one of the first gifts our grandparents and great-grandparents give us: sometimes they make decisions for people they will never meet.

My Avó

I was incredibly close to my mother's mother, my Portuguese Avó.

She wasn't a grandmother I saw occasionally on holidays. She was woven into the ordinary rhythm of my life, and when I became a mother, I wanted my own son to know her that way too. When Mickey was little, I took him to my Avó's house several times a week.

I wasn't consciously preserving a generational connection. I was simply taking my little boy to see the grandmother I loved.

Now I understand that this is often how family traditions survive. Nobody announces that something important is being handed down. We simply keep showing up, keep cooking the foods we know, keep telling the stories and keep doing the things that feel so ordinary we barely notice them.

My Avó crocheted a blanket for me with her own hands. Decades later, on the very last day I spent with three of my grandchildren, we piled together on Grammie's bed inside my tractor-trailer. Underneath us was that blanket.

Her great-great-grandchildren were sitting on something their great-great-grandmother had made.

My Avó could never have imagined that moment when she was crocheting it for me.

But her hands reached them anyway.

There are other things she gave me that traveled forward in ways I didn't recognize at the time.

Food was part of our family. Making it, sharing it and gathering around it continued into the relationship I had with my own son, even after he became an adult.

Then eventually I became Grammie, and there I was making bread with my grandson Joshy.

When we made bread together, I wasn't giving him a lesson about Portuguese heritage or explaining the responsibility of carrying family traditions into another generation. We were simply a grandmother and her grandson making bread together.

Only now can I look backward and see the distance that bread had traveled.

Something from the world I knew with my Avó had made its way through me and into an afternoon with my grandson.

A Grandfather and His Grandson

My father was born in Hawaiʻi, and when he became a grandfather, he and Mickey became extremely close.

This wasn't simply the expected affection between a grandfather and grandson. They genuinely enjoyed each other. They shared interests, experiences and a closeness that belonged entirely to the two of them.

They were Washington, D.C. trip close—so close that one of their trips together nearly caused Mickey to miss his own prom. They were Notre Dame and Ohio State close. They shared a love of history, and Mickey would eventually earn his degree in history.

And that graduation meant everything to my Dad.

Mickey was going to become the first person in our entire family to graduate from university. My father was so proud that he told the family he could “die now” because Mickey was graduating.

I also knew my father well enough to know that he was going to struggle with one very important question: which Aloha shirt was worthy of this occasion?

My Dad wore Aloha shirts when life called for something special. Weddings, baptisms, graduations and funerals were marked that way.

So for Mickey's Ohio State graduation, I special-ordered an Ohio State Aloha shirt for my father and had it shipped to him.

My Dad cried his eyes out when he opened the package.

He wore that shirt when he watched his grandson become the first university graduate in our family.

Years later, when Mickey married in Ohio, my father wore that same Ohio State Aloha shirt to his grandson's wedding.

I don't think any of us standing there thought we were watching a tradition being transferred from one generation to another.

But we were.

Today, Mickey wears an Aloha shirt to weddings, funerals, baptisms and graduations, just as his grandfather did.

At my grandson Jakey's baptism, Mickey wore an Aloha shirt and I wore an Aloha dress. There we were with his little boy between us, marking another important family moment in a way that had become completely natural to us.

Nobody ever sat Mickey down and instructed him to carry on his grandfather's tradition.

He loved his grandfather. He watched him.

And somewhere along the way, Grandpa's tradition became Mickey's tradition too.

The Lei Came With Us, Too

Aloha attire wasn't the only part of Hawaiʻi that traveled through our family.

My parents wore leis for our weddings and graduations. Their children and grandchildren grew up wearing them for the important passages in our lives.

When Mickey graduated from The Ohio State University, I specially ordered a kukui nut lei from Hawaiʻi for him. I didn't choose it simply because it was beautiful. The kukui represents light, wisdom and guidance—a deeply meaningful lei for a graduate stepping from one chapter of his life into another.

Years later, when Mickey married, I again ordered leis appropriate for the occasion. He and his bride wore white flower and ti leaf leis, carrying the Hawaiian traditions of love, blessings and protection into their marriage. My Dad came dressed in his Aloha attire and wore the traditional leis, too.

And the kukui would appear in our family again under very different circumstances.

When my Dad passed from this Earth, every one of his pallbearers wore a kukui nut lei.

That matters.

Flowers eventually fade. The kukui does not. It can be kept, carried and passed from one generation to another.

His children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren came to his funeral in Aloha attire. The men and boys wore Aloha shirts, the women and girls wore Aloha dresses, the pallbearers wore Aloha shirts, and we all wore leis as we said goodbye.

Our leis were never decorations. They marked passages. They carried meaning. They connected generations.

They were part of how our family honored the person, the tradition, and the moment. Nobody needed to explain why. My Dad had already taught us how.

Perhaps the things our grandparents hand down most successfully are the things nobody ever sits us down and tells us we're supposed to keep. We keep them because they became part of us.

And My Mother Became Avó

My mother became a grandmother and then a great-grandmother, and she has her own relationships with the generations who followed her.

This past July, she flew from Hawaiʻi for a family reunion that brought together her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. My son and all four of my grandchildren were among them.

I was not part of that gathering, and I won't pretend that truth doesn't carry pain for me. But this is Grandparents Day, and another truth can exist beside that one.

My mother showed up for the generations that came after her.

She traveled from Hawaiʻi to be with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, to gather with them and honor the family that has grown from the generations before us.

I can hurt over my own absence and still honor her presence.

I can honor my mother as a grandmother and great-grandmother without requiring my own heart to stop hurting first.

Perhaps that, too, is part of what it means to understand family as something larger than one moment in time.

And Then I Became Grammie

For much of my life, grandparents were the people above me in the family tree.

Then one day, I became one. Four children now have a Grammie because of me. And becoming Grammie changed the way I understood my own grandparents.

I know now what it feels like when a little person runs toward you. I know what it means to remember the smallest details about them, to find yourself planning something simply because you know they would love it, and to discover that their happiness somehow becomes part of your own.

I also understand now why the ordinary things mattered so much.

My Avó probably didn't know which moments with her I would remember decades later. My father couldn't have known that Mickey would someday put on an Aloha shirt for an important occasion because Grandpa had done it before him.

None of us really knows what will travel forward.

A child may forget something we thought was enormously important and carry forever something we barely noticed ourselves doing.

That is what makes the generations so extraordinary.

What We Hand Forward

My great-grandparents left Madeira carrying children toward a future they couldn't see. My Avó gave me a closeness I later wanted my own son to experience, and something as simple as the blanket she crocheted eventually reached children born generations after her.

My father gave his grandson a relationship so close that pieces of Grandpa still appear whenever Mickey puts on an Aloha shirt for one of life's important occasions. My parents passed down the lei that traveled from Hawaiʻi to graduations and weddings in the mainland and eventually surrounded our family when we said goodbye to my father.

My mother continues to gather with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren who came after her.

I became Grammie and found myself making bread with Joshy, without realizing at the time how many generations were standing invisibly in that kitchen with us.

This is what I want to honor on Grandparents Day.

Not a perfect family. I don't know that such a thing exists.

I want to honor the generations and the remarkable way love, culture, traditions and ordinary family life can travel through them.

Sometimes what survives is something we can hold, like my Avó's blanket. Sometimes it is something we wear. Sometimes it is a food we make without thinking about where we first learned it. And sometimes it is simply the way we make another person feel when they walk through our door.

Before I was Grammie, I was a granddaughter.

One day, my grandchildren may look back and recognize things they received from generations of people whose names stretch far beyond mine.

And perhaps that is one of the greatest privileges of being a grandparent.

We get to stand in the middle of the generations—loving the people who came before us while handing pieces of them, and pieces of ourselves, to the people who will carry the family forward.

On this Grandparents Day, I honor my great-grandparents, my Avós, my parents and every generation that made it possible for me eventually to hear one of the most beautiful names I have ever been given:

Grammie.

Happy Grandparents Day.

Heart's Renewal

Heard · Held · Not Alone

Peace · Purpose · Wholeness