Nurture your connections to the people who matter most.
If there is one lesson I have learned over the course of my life, it is this: we cannot do it alone. Relationships are life-giving and life-supporting. Of all I have accumulated these last sixty-odd years, my relationships are what I hold most precious. My relationships with my children and grandchildren, with my two husbands, with my sisters and with my friends have all nourished and protected me from the ravages and challenges of my life. At the same time, they have deepened my most joyful and celebratory moments. Friendships have helped to soothe and calm my inner life during dark and turbulent hours. My relationships with my children have taught me profound lessons about adulthood and the human condition. In short, my relationships have shaped who I am and who I am still becoming.
When it comes to living a vibrant life as an older adult, studies show that friendships are indispensible. In 1976, Harvard University researchers began the landmark Nurses’ Health Study, established by Drs. Frank Speizer and Walter Willett. The purpose was to investigate an array of factors that affect women’s health, with particular focus on cancer prevention. More than 238,000 nurses participated. The researchers discovered that the more friends a woman has, the less likely she is to develop physical impairments as she ages, and the more likely she is to experience joy. The most stunning finding: researchers suggested that the role of close friendships is so significant that not having close confidantes is as detrimental to a woman’s health as smoking or being overweight.
The costs of social isolation are high—across virtually all of the chronic illnesses affecting older adults, from cancer and arthritis to depression and neurodegenerative disease, maintaining social networks and nurturing relationships is regarded as a key preventive measure. “Having someone you can confide in helps prevent depression and helps you recover from depression,” says Dr. Marie-France Rivard, a geriatric psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at the University of Ottawa. Another study found that people with no friends increased their risk of death over a six-month period, while another study found that people with the most friends over a nine-year period reduced their chance of premature death by almost two-thirds.
In a 2002 breakthrough study on friendship among women, UCLA researchers discovered that women’s propensity to form a network of close relationships may be one of the reasons we live longer than men. And fittingly, the genesis of the study was a joking conversation between Drs. Shelley Taylor and Laura Klein about how differently women researchers behaved when stressed compared to their male counterparts. It was a long-standing joke that when women researchers were stressed, they came into the lab, cleaned it up and bonded with other researchers over coffee. When the men were stressed, they tended to hole up in some private area of the lab. One day, Dr. Taylor and Dr. Klein got talking about how as much as 90 percent of the research on stress was conducted on men.
Over the course of their work together, Dr. Taylor and Dr. Klein made a stunning discovery: women respond to stress very differently than men do. Before the study, scientists thought that stress triggered within all humans a freeze or flee response. And while this is typically true in men, the UCLA study found that in women, stress triggers the release of oxytocin. Also known as the “love hormone,” oxytocin is released after childbirth and serves multiple purposes—it shrinks the uterus, stimulates milk production, promotes mother–baby bonding and also induces that feeling of euphoria that (almost) makes you forget about the pain you’ve just endured.
According to Dr. Taylor and Dr. Klein’s research, when oxytocin is released as part of the stress response in women, it triggers a “tend and befriend” response, encouraging a woman either to tend to her children or loved ones, or to gather other women around her. The positive feelings induced by tending and befriending release yet more oxytocin, which creates further feelings of calm, connection and safety. In men, however, stress tends to trigger the release of testosterone, which impedes the calming properties of oxytocin.
One of the biggest stressors older women can face is the death of a spouse. When the UCLA researchers examined the role of friendships among women who had recently been widowed, they discovered that those with close friendships were more likely to get through the experience without negative health outcomes.
I know the “tend and befriend” response well. In fact, the term conjures in my mind the memory of my dear friend Lady Mary Mitchell and her lovely villa in Jamaica.
Pierre and I were all set to travel to Jamaica for a state trip in 1972 when the high commissioner informed us that the hotel where we were staying didn’t permit babies. (Today it probably even allows pets.) We were put instead in a guest house on the estate of Sir Harold and Lady Mary Mitchell. And thus began one of the most nurturing and enriching friendships of my life. Sir Harold was a former United Kingdom Conservative MP. Lady Mary was originally Mary Pringle, an heiress to the Pringle of Scotland company, internationally renowned for its beautiful cashmere sweaters. I didn’t see much of Sir Harold during that visit, but Lady Mary was an absolute delight. She was worldly, interesting and smart. She counted the playwright Noel Coward among her close friends. From the moment I met her, I fell in love with her in the way we can only love a friend—I sat at her feet, listened to her stories and felt reassured. She saw the strain I was experiencing in my marriage, and she lent a listening ear, showing incredible sympathy, offering sage advice, but never taking sides. I trusted her completely.
Lady Mary ran her estate with little fuss; the meals were simple and excellent, all prepared, she said, by “Mrs. MacFarlane.” When midafternoon came, she’d head back to the big house from where we’d been chatting at our villa, claiming she’d ask Mrs. MacFarlane to make us G&Ts “without the tonic.” I remember one evening during that trip, a bishop came to visit. Lady Mary loved to dance—as did I—and we had resolved to head down to a nearby dance club that evening. “But first,” she said, “we must put the bishop to bed.” She always had her priorities in order.
I went back year after year, as did Pierre, even after our breakup. Lady Mary’s estate became an oasis of calm for me. It was not simply on account of the luxurious surroundings and fantastic weather. It was because of Lady Mary, and our wonderful relationship. To this day I miss our friendship deeply.
Women like Lady Mary have been an incredible source of strength for me. While my younger adulthood was filled with challenges, I always had plenty of time to nurture my friendships—and for that I’m grateful. But that is not always the case, point out Drs. Terri Apter and Ruthellen Josselson in their book Best Friends: The Pleasure and Perils of Girls’ and Women’s Friendships. In fact, they point out that when women become stressed or busy, one of the first things we eliminate from our schedules is our time with friends.
Make Time for Friends
I have made many mistakes in my life, and failing to keep up with friends has been one of my biggest. The best version of me has a deeply held knowledge that in order to remain mentally healthy, I must maintain my social networks. In fact, the only time I have let relationships go is when I have been in the throes of either depression or mania. Unfortunately, until recently that was quite often. Since my recovery, I have tried hard to keep in touch with old friends and make new ones too.
One of the ways I keep up my friendships is the good old-fashioned telephone. Almost every day, I try to call a close friend for a conversation. My friends are scattered all over the world, and telephone conversations offer a wonderful way for us to stay connected and provide emotional support to each other even though thousands of kilometres may separate us.
Another way I have maintained strong friendships has been to allot visiting time when I travel. It’s easy, while travelling, to be away for no more time than is necessary to visit your family members, attend a conference or otherwise fulfill the main purpose of your trip. There is often some inexplicable pull homeward. I have learned to ensure I always leave time to visit friends. So for instance, when I travel to Ottawa to visit Justin and Sophie, I always try to see at least a few of my dear Ottawa friends.
Women have different types of friends, says Margaret Critchlow, an anthropologist and trainer in healthy aging-in-place courses—courses that teach older adults how to live well in their homes so they don’t need to move into a nursing home. There are old, old friends with whom you share a bond that may go back decades. And there are new friends who infuse your life with excitement and new energy. Finding and nurturing both is incredibly important. “We spend so much time working on financial plans but almost no time working on friendship plans,” says Critchlow. In her workshops, Critchlow urges participants to regard their social connections in the same way they regard their investment portfolios. “You have blue-chip friends and growth stocks,” she says. “You have to invest in both.”
Blue-chip friendships are those that have been forged over time and through shared experience. You trust each other deeply and know each other intimately, and because of this, Critchlow says, you reap a “steady return on investment” from each other in terms of mutual encouragement, understanding and support. When I think of blue-chip friends, I think of Vicky Wilgress, and the girlfriends I first met years ago at the Parent Resource Centre in Ottawa.
Ottawa is a beautiful city, but I have a complicated relationship with the place. It’s where my children were born, and it has also borne witness to the most challenging periods of my life. During my time as the prime minister’s wife and for a period afterward, I found it difficult to make friends. I was vulnerable, and I worried that I would not be able to trust the people I met, or that I was being unfairly judged. I was lonely.
Following Kyle’s birth, I began taking him to the resource centre to participate in playgroups and other programs. Over a few months of showing up consistently, I formed friendships with some of the other mothers. While our children played together, we talked about books, our marriages, money, food, great restaurants, music and so on. Someone decided we should move playgroup from the centre into our homes. Then, once the children were in school, we met for book club one evening a month. These women were a tremendous source of support to me during my illness and after the deaths of Michel and Pierre. They filled my freezer with food and soup, they sat with me while I cried, and they continued to show up even after I insisted that I was fine.
These shared experiences have created a strong bond between us. They truly are my blue-chip friends—I’ll nurture and protect those friendships forever.
Growth-stock friendships are a little different, but no less important to your health. They are newer friendships with people you are powerfully drawn to. “You invest a little bit of energy into the relationship and it tends to grow quickly,” says Critchlow. The beauty of these friendships is that they offer inspiration, new ideas and opportunities to expand. Take my friend Nancy. We have been friends for only a few years, and we take pleasure in each other’s diverse perspectives. While I was home raising children, Nancy was forging a high-powered career. We each bring a unique viewpoint to the friendship, and getting to know one another has been fun.
Nancy’s newest venture is a sprawling farm north of Toronto. I went to visit her recently, imagining we would have a relaxing weekend, sipping lemonade on her patio as we took in the sweep of fields surrounding the house. This is likely the experience I might have had on a weekend visit with one of my blue-chip friends. Not so in Nancy’s case. After a lovely—if bumpy—tour of her property in her Gator, we spent the rest of the time at work: cooking up hundreds of pounds of rhubarb into rhubarb jam, stringing up tomato vines and hand-watering acres of vegetables for her vegetable stall in a nearby farmers’ market. The work was gruelling, and not something I normally do. My arms were sore for days. And yet, the novelty of the experience was challenging, invigorating and wonderful. It was the stuff of growth-stock friends.
Diversity among friends is important. It’s easy to find yourself surrounded with people who are exactly like you—perhaps the same age, socioeconomic level or sharing the same interests. But by expanding your network to include friends with different backgrounds, you expand and support mental well-being, says Dr. Anna Kudak, author of What Happy Women Do, in a 2012 interview with MSN. “Friendships with older and younger people help broaden your perspective, which in turn allows you to have compassion and empathy in your day-to-day life.”
According to Dr. Suzanne Degges-White, co-author of Friends Forever: How Girls and Women Forge Lasting Relationships, while many solid friendships begin the way mine did at the Parent Resource Centre in Ottawa—between people who share similar interests or life circumstances—the ones that deepen and grow are always built on mutual trust, compassion, honesty and unconditional acceptance. I welcome opportunities to spend time with younger people. For instance, my sons often invite me up for big celebrations at their family property at Morin-Heights. They also invite their own friends. Spending time with younger people is a fabulous antidote to the perils of aging, I’ve found. But nurturing friendships with older people can be every bit as rewarding. For instance, Drs. Lawrence Weiss and Marjorie Lowenthal, from the University of California, concluded that older adults perceive the complexity in situations more than younger people do, which can make us valuable and astute friends. I think of my lovely friend Martine, who, in her late eighties, still cycles twenty kilometres on a weekend, and devotes herself to learning new languages to keep herself sharp. And there is something comforting about having friends who are significantly older than us; they offer a much-needed perspective that our contemporaries can rarely offer. Martine has travelled the world, had marriages, raised children, and she has also been alone. When I feel tired or scared or bored with myself, I call Martine, and she inspires me.
Make New Friends
So it’s one thing to nurture existing friends. It’s quite another to make new ones. Critchlow points out that the beauty of making friends as an older adult is that we are more confident, and often surer of ourselves and what we stand for. This can make it easier to form authentic relationships, although she suggests it can also make us more rigid. “It’s important to remain open-minded,” she points out. One way to do this is to take on new challenges, to remain outwardly focused by getting involved with new projects or activities. This is how Critchlow virtually doubled her circle of friends overnight.
She and a colleague had been discussing the idea of creating a co-housing facility in Sooke, B.C., for several years, until one day they decided it was time to take action. They booked a meeting room above a grocery store and posted notices around town. On the appointed evening, they arrived early, hoping at least one person would show up. In the end, more than thirty people came through the doors. Some were friends she and her colleague had known for years. Others were people she’d never met. Over the next few months, as the group crystallized and began creating a vision and plans for what their co-housing project would look like, they developed stronger friendships with one another. Through these relationships, Critchlow found she was beginning to pursue exciting new hobbies and activities she’d never imagined doing. For instance, one of the men who attended the co-housing meeting expressed a desire for the community to have a ropes course, an outdoor obstacle course made primarily of ropes and an activity for personal and team development. Critchlow was skeptical. So the man set up a ropes course for her and others to try. They had a blast.
By pursuing a new interest—the development of a co-housing unit—Critchlow says, “I’m doing more new things than I have done since I was a teenager.” By remaining outwardly focused and committed to a growth curve, she has not only diversified her “social portfolio,” but also fulfilled the promise of her generation. “We were going to change the world in the ‘60s,” she says. “Now we are in our sixties and we finally have the time to do it.” Finding friendships to nurture, energize and support us is critical to living a life rich in adventure and contribution, she says.
I couldn’t agree more. My work as a brain health advocate has put me in contact with some of the country’s leading practitioners in mental health and neuroscience. I am passionate about acquiring knowledge related to brain health, and so I have joined boards of national mental health organizations, and I speak at and attend mental health conferences as often as possible. These activities have helped me build my professional and personal networks. I enjoy running into colleagues at international conferences. I adore working the room at conference networking events, keeping my ears pricked for new research and groundbreaking studies. The professional friendships I have cultivated energize and renew me.
If you take an inventory of your friends and find you have plenty of blue-chip friends but too few growth stocks, consider taking up new activities, joining community groups or volunteering your time at organizations where you will have an opportunity to meet different people. New friendships can infuse our lives with vibrancy and excitement.
Recognize the Power of Friendship
In a culture that remains hyper-focused on youth, friendships can encourage us to contribute and create positive change. When Dr. Martha Beck moved from Arizona to California several years ago, she discovered a group of older women who, like her, loved horses and went out riding each week. She joined them. Their trail rides throughout the central coast region are characterized by a spirit of adventurousness and the quest for change, she says. The women talked about different groups they were organizing: book clubs, social activism organizations, Bible study sessions. “I realized that these older women were actually creating a backbone of social action.”
There is power in women “ganging up.” In 2001, two women from Wolfville, Nova Scotia, challenged each other to put on a production of The Vagina Monologues. They recruited some of their friends, who in turn recruited other friends, to perform and help with set creation, stage management, marketing and ticket sales. They performed to a sold-out crowd and donated the proceeds to charity. Since then, the Women of Wolfville have put on shows to sold-out crowds nearly every year, forming strong bonds of friendship while donating thousands of dollars to charity.
The playwright Eve Ensler, creator of The Vagina Monologues, is known for uniting women against sexual violence. In her stunning memoir, In the Body of the World, she relates how it was her friendships with other women that saw her through a devastating battle with uterine cancer.
As older adulthood brings with it the increased risks of poor health and loss, friendships provide us with the support we require to get through our challenges. Such is the power of friendship among women.
Adult Children: Choose a Way and Stick to It
As critical as our relationships with friends may be, the relationships we have with our children are important too. And these relationships go through profound changes as we age.
“Women sometimes struggle with the sense of always being a caretaker, being the protector, no matter where their kids are, what they’re doing, or whether she has the capacity to be available to them,” says family therapist Resa Eisen. And while this role makes sense when our children are small, it can become a liability as we get older, says Eisen. “The problems start when either the woman or the kids find it hard to separate.”
How do you separate from a being to whom you have given life? I find this desperately difficult, and I know that other women struggle with it also. I have friends whose grown children complain they help too little, but there are many others out there, including grandmothers, who possibly help too much.
The best advice I ever received on the topic of helping grown children came from my mother’s best friend from childhood. Aunty Joan is my godmother, and a wonderful lady. At 95 years of age, this tiny woman is as strong and determined as anything. She married early in life, as one did back then, and had four children. Her husband, a doctor, died very young, leaving her to raise her children alone.
There was always a no-frills, no-fantasy, stiff-upper-lip English quality to her that I loved. And yet, she was a firecracker: so engaging, alive and curious, always remembering everything about everyone and asking exactly the right questions. I used to take my mother there regularly, and Aunty Joan would serve up these perfect little baby sandwiches filled with butter and raisins. They were simply delicious. The last time I visited her we had a rousing discussion about politics. As I was leaving, she asked me a favour. “Margaret, could you please ask Justin to stop sending me emails? I’ve already given him all the money I’m allowed to donate.” I told her I would put in a word—but didn’t mention that I too get Justin’s “Dear Margaret” emails.
When Aunty Joan became old enough that she no longer wanted to live alone, she added an efficient and private granny suite to the side of her home, with a separate entrance from outside, where she lives independently. She offered the main house to her daughter and her family. She is a political activist and wants the government to give more tax relief to families choosing to care for their elderly at home. Aunty Joan remains an integral part of her children’s and grandchildren’s lives, even offering an ironing service once a week to one daughter, an obligation she fulfills with cheer and precision.
I love the idea of choosing a way to help and sticking with it. After she graduated from university, my daughter, Ally, scored a wonderful position as a social media/marketing director at a chic company. The only problem was that her employer was located on the other side of the city. It would have taken her more than an hour to get to work via public transit, and I did not feel comfortable with her walking to the metro in the dark. So I offered to drive her. At first it seemed a little thing—a small favour to do for my youngest child. But over the past two years it has become a hefty commitment—well over two hours in the car each day, often battling rush-hour traffic. Then, of course, there’s the cost of fuel and car repairs. But I chose to offer this help to my daughter, and I am happy to keep doing it. It makes me feel connected. We have valued time together each day. Through it all, Ally has been extremely appreciative. Still, I have been urging her to consider buying a car so that she can drive herself.
One of the challenges of parenting adult children is to do our best by them without enabling their dependence—or our own. The desire to help our kids can in some circumstances jeopardize our financial security over the long term. As with my decision to drive my daughter to work, these issues most always arise from the best of intentions.
Christine owned one of the most exclusive women’s fashion boutiques in Ottawa. She began working at the store in the 1970s, and ultimately bought out the original owner and moved the entire store to a bigger, posher location on Sussex Drive. A couple of years ago, around the time her twenty-year lease was coming up for renewal, her son approached her and asked if she might consider transferring her lease to him. He had a successful business selling upscale home decor and saw an opportunity to grow the business with a second location. But not just any location. Watching his mother succeed in that swanky retail space had taught him the importance of real estate. He also asked if Christine would consider managing the store for him.
At the time, Christine was proud of the business she had built up, but she was feeling slightly bored and in need of a new challenge she could sink her teeth into. So she agreed. “I thought it would be an easy transition to close my store and work for my son. I would still be working with beautiful things and interacting with people.”
So over the next few weeks, Christine sold off her stock, gave notice to her customers, transferred her lease to her son and closed down the business she had painstakingly built. She was sad to see the boutique go, but eager to start a new project and use her considerable skills and expertise to help her son.
When she showed up at work on the first day, she knew something was wrong the moment she saw her son’s face. “He told me he’d decided to bring in his girlfriend to help manage the store.” At first he’d thought his mother and girlfriend could work together. But his girlfriend had confessed to him that she didn’t want to work with Christine. “It was my first day on the job working for my son and I got fired.”
The anger and betrayal Christine felt was tempered by the love she felt for her son. “I was trying to be graceful about it,” she says. “It’s your child and you don’t want to hurt him. You want him to succeed.” And yet, with limited savings and now no source of income, Christine had allowed her desire to support her son’s career to wreak havoc on her own financial future. As a resourceful and highly skilled woman, Christine has landed on her feet. After two years of hard work and much soul-searching she opened a new boutique, even better than the last. Her experience shows me the resilience she found within to get beyond the obstacles life threw at her.
Setting boundaries can be difficult. In fact, a 2008 study by R.D. Moremen, published in the Journal of Women and Aging, showed that most older women choose to avoid conflict rather than confront others about situations that hurt or disappoint them. And so rather than deal with the issue, we bear it quietly, which in turn makes us feel resentful or bitter. This response is the opposite of what we should be doing: long-lasting friendships are based on open, honest and authentic communication.
When setting boundaries with friends or loved ones, it’s important to understand the mistaken beliefs that underlie a failure to be assertive, writes psychologist Dr. Martha Davis in her classic text, The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook. For instance, a commonly held belief is that we should look after the needs of other people before our own. In reality, it is perfectly acceptable to put our own needs first sometimes. Another is that it’s wrong to be antisocial, when, in fact, it’s reasonable to wish to be alone at times. And yet another is that when people are in trouble, we should always help them. The truth: it isn’t our responsibility to take ownership of other people’s problems. Applying right thinking to the beliefs that keep us from respecting ourselves is an important step in becoming our own best friends.
Learning how to confront others is equally important. Like many people, I do not enjoy confrontation, but I have learned to make myself do it when necessary. In a Great Courses lecture series on effective communications, York University’s Dr. Dalton Kehoe, a social psychologist, explains why we feel so uncomfortable confronting others. It all comes down to the cognitive unconscious—a part of the brain that processes information rapidly and helps us make the split-second decisions that can save our lives. For instance, the cognitive unconscious is at work when you move to cross the street but stop yourself just as a car barrels through the crosswalk. The executive functioning part of the brain, he argues, is far too slow and calculating for such a rapid response. But the cognitive unconscious cannot tell the difference between a physical threat and a threat to the ego. This is why we humans tend to exhibit specific fight or flight responses when we are in a heated exchange: rapid breathing, elevated heart rate, even a queasy or nauseated sensation in the stomach. Dr. Kehoe calls this response an “amygdala hijack,” so named for the section of the brain—the amygdala—that is the source of much of our cognitive unconscious programming and that often takes over our rational mind in heated moments.
The key to overcoming an amygdala hijack is to breathe deeply in an effort to give the rational mind some time to “catch up.” At that point, it’s useful to have a structure with which to initiate a confrontation. In her book Fierce Conversations, executive coach Susan Scott provides a framework. The goal is to examine your thinking before you engage in the conversation, to present your issue clearly and then to spend most of your time listening to the other person in order to better understand them. Scott suggests that before confronting someone, you do the following: name the issue as concisely as possible, determine the current impact on you and others, determine the future implications for you and others, examine your own contribution to the issue and describe the ideal outcome.
You can do this, or you can follow the “three strikes you’re out” rule a friend of mine uses to protect her boundaries. When someone behaves in a hurtful or disrespectful manner, my friend will notify the person but mentally keep note of the “trespass.” If a person makes two more “strikes,” this friend simply moves away from the friendship. I admire her discipline, but I fear I’m too soft for that. I have made my share of mistakes—probably at least three for each friend. My focus is on enriching my relationships as much as I possibly can.
Boundaries are useful when it comes to engaging with our families. One of the enduring annoyances for many grandparents is the sense that we exist strictly as providers of free babysitting. I vividly recall the fatigue of parenthood—and the relative freedom my parents had just when I was living through one of life’s busiest phases. But sometimes grandmothers simply don’t feel like babysitting. I again borrow Aunty Joan’s guideline, and try to be as useful as I can within limits. I live a few minutes away from Sacha, Zoë and their three gorgeous children, Pierre, Gala and Ariane. When it comes to babysitting, I specify that I will do it at my house, where I am surrounded by my own things and can totally relax once the little ones have gone to bed. I keep a drawer stocked with pyjamas, diapers and clothing so that we are never without the supplies we need. With boundaries in place, I feel free to give of my time and energy, knowing that I have been clear about what I will and won’t do.
The most gorgeous part of babysitting grandchildren is that it provides an opportunity to rediscover your own inner child. Recently I was in Ottawa visiting Justin and Sophie and their children, Xavier, Ella-Grace and Hadrien. Xavier and Ella-Grace requested that I take them to a nearby play park. I agreed, thinking I would sit on a bench and watch them as they played. Ella-Grace had different ideas. She lured me onto the play structures, where I spent a few hours climbing, sliding and laughing harder than I have in years.
Of course when it comes to grandchildren, we have to be cognizant not only of our own boundaries, but also of those of our grandchildren’s parents. From the beginning, I understood that respecting the wishes of my sons and their spouses, and following their instructions related to their children’s diet and bedtime, were essential. Sometimes I see friends attempting to correct parenting mistakes they believe their children are making. This is not our job. As grandparents, our role is to love and support both our children and their children—not to push them into accepting wisdom we may feel we learned the hard way and wish to share.
In the rare instances when I disagree with my children’s parenting approach, I hold my tongue and keep the big picture in mind. And that big picture is my relationship with them and their families. My goal is to have an excellent, long-term relationship based on trust. When that relationship is solid, I can have all the fun with my grandchildren that I want (in truth, I can never have enough).
When my first grandchild was born, I remember holding him in my arms and feeling a sweeping love I had never experienced before—but I have felt it since at the birth of each successive grandchild. With them, I have a chance to do things better and right. My love for my grandchildren keeps me young and vibrant and filled with purpose. That sort of unconditional love gives us what all beautiful, enduring relationships do: gratitude, joy, and a compelling reason to be our very best and enrich the world as much as we can.