“As long as there’s one person on earth who remembers you, it isn’t over” —Oscar Hammerstein

In the first months my daughter was home I would look into her face and marvel, wondering at how familiar the look she gave me was.

From where did I know that curious, intent gaze?

One afternoon like so many others, I placed my sleeping daughter in her crib for a nap, then turned and walked through the doorway next to the foot of the stairs into

the former dining room

This room framed so many cherished memories—Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with relatives long gone

—including that one year when Mom and I arrived late and Grandma cleared the table before we got there! We spooned the still-warm leftovers onto our plates and carried them into the dining room where we ate alone, just the two of us at the emptied table, chuckling with disbelief. —

In recent years, the room had been transformed into Grandma’s bedroom. The mahogany dining table had been moved out, replaced by a bed, and the alcove above the window seat was filled with grandma’s clothes hanging from the newly installed rod.

I moved through that doorway multiple times each day, fetching Grandma her morning mug of Total cereal or coming to pick up the pills she dropped when they rolled out of her reach under the bed.

Coming into the room that particular afternoon, my eyes met my Granddad’s gaze from his portrait on the opposite wall, and suddenly I knew!

I saw on his face the same intense, intelligent expression as that with which my baby daughter regarded me.

How fortunate I felt to be enfolded within their generation-spanning resemblance to one another! Though Granddad died decades before their birth and so never got to meet his great-grandchildren, yet he continues in my memory. Seeing him reflected in my children, I feel the weight and joy of recognizing this connection which exists through and as me.