The Stories We Keep

Earlier this year, I lost my grandmother, just shy of her 96th birthday.

Losing someone who has been there for your entire life is a strange thing. You know their stories, their routines, the little things that make them who they are. And yet, after they’re gone, you realise just how much of their life existed before you were ever part of it.

As my family began going through my grandparents’ home, sorting through almost a lifetime of belongings, we started finding pieces of their story everywhere.

There was a story my grandfather had written for the newspaper many years ago. In it, he wrote about the many businesses he had started and built throughout his life. But woven through those stories were glimpses of something much more personal: his life with my grandmother, the family they had created, and what it was like raising their four children together.

Then there were the smaller things.

I found recipes my grandmother had written by hand. Pieces of paper that probably hadn’t seemed particularly significant when she wrote them, but suddenly felt incredibly precious because the handwriting was hers.

And at her funeral, we watched old home movies of my grandparents when they were young.

I’d seen photographs of them from that time before, but seeing them moving, laughing and being themselves felt completely different.

For a few minutes, they weren’t my grandma and grandpa.

They were two young people building a life together. Raising a family. Taking chances. Starting businesses. Making memories that, at the time, probably just felt like everyday life.

And somehow, all these years later, through the things they had left behind, I got to meet a version of them I’d never really known.

We don’t always know what will become a keepsake

I keep thinking about those handwritten recipes.

My grandmother probably wasn’t thinking about preserving a memory when she wrote them. She was writing down ingredients. Something practical. Something ordinary.

But that’s the thing about keepsakes.

We don’t always know what will matter later.

A handwritten recipe can become a way to see someone’s handwriting again.

An old home movie can let you hear their laugh.

A story written decades ago can introduce you to a version of someone you never had the chance to know.

A letter can preserve exactly how someone felt about you at a particular moment in their life.

The things that feel ordinary now can become extraordinary simply because of who they belonged to.

The people we love had lives before us

There’s something strange about seeing someone you’ve known your whole life in a time before you existed.

We know our grandparents as grandparents. Our parents as parents.

But before they were those people to us, they were falling in love. Starting businesses. Making mistakes. Raising children. Building homes. Imagining what their lives might become.

There are entire versions of the people we love that we may never get to know.

And sometimes, it’s the things they leave behind that allow us to know them a little better.

Keep the ordinary things

We tend to preserve the milestones.

The wedding photographs. The birthdays. The anniversaries. The births.

But a life isn’t only made up of milestones.

It’s Sunday mornings and private jokes. Recipes scribbled onto pieces of paper. The meal someone made every Christmas. The photograph nobody thought was particularly special. The stories told around the dinner table.

So ask the questions.

Ask your grandparents how they met.

Ask your mum what she remembers about becoming a mother.

Ask your dad what he wanted his life to look like when he was twenty.

Write some of it down.

Take the photograph.

Keep the letter.

Write the date on the back.

And maybe don’t throw away the handwritten recipe.

Because we don’t always know which pieces of an ordinary life will mean everything to someone one day.

Some words are worth keeping forever

Poetic Romance has always been about putting the things that matter into words.

But losing my grandmother made me understand the importance of keeping those words in a different way.

We can’t keep every moment or hold onto the people we love forever.

But we can keep pieces of them.

A story. A photograph. A recipe in their handwriting. A letter. A few sentences about something they never wanted us to forget.

Things we might find years from now and, for a moment, feel a little closer to them again.

Maybe that’s why writing something down matters so much.

It says:

This happened.

This was us.

I want you to remember.