In My Life

My grandmother always said her favorite song was “In My Life” by The Beatles. So it was that, for years before I heard it in any other context, or recognized that it was a famous song by the most famous band that ever played—the kind of song many people know, and just about everyone has heard at one time or another—I associated it all with Grandma Jean.

I’ve written about Grandma Jean here before, but to recap she was, bar none, my favorite figure from my childhood. A kind woman, retired before I was born, transplanted from the bustling streets of New York to a raised ranch situated in quiet Upstate New York neighborhood. I remember her as genuinely interested in what my sister and I had to say; she was the best gift giver and the one to spoil us with too many sweets at Christmas time.

In connecting “In My Life” and all of its inveterate nostalgia to Grandma Jean and her life, I accessed an empathy for what it was like to be old, and to have most of the people who had made up your life situated in your rear-view mirror (an imperfect metaphor, because Grandma had never did learn how to drive a car). Moreover, though my grandmother didn’t pass away until I was twenty-four, I understood mortality through her—an example of someone so old such that it was clear she’d pass before me, and an example of someone whom I would miss wholeheartedly when she was gone.

There are these lyrics:

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

I always took these lyrics to reference someone who came before, due a greater, almost reverential kind of love that no other memory could compare to. I outgrew the sentiment—still very much putting my grandmother on a pedestal, but not so quick to assess that I love her more than the closest friends I’ve now known longer than her, my sister, my wife. My understanding of the song didn’t change, but my ability to identify so readily with that heart of it did.

Then there was Riley.

When my son was born I felt a love unlike any I’d experienced before. The kind of love that gets you up for middle of the night feedings, has you wear spit-up on your shoulder in public, and has you wipe away feces without resentment or even so much a sense of obligation as a desire to take care of someone you feel so fortunate to have around.

I know there’s a risk of over-sentimentalizing a baby. He’s not formed enough to hold anything against him, or to have developed opinions I disagree with, or to have done much of anything with a sense of agency or intent.

Still, though I’m past the point when I’d pay any meaningful thought to ranking people in my life, when it comes to my son, I understand “In My Life” as not entirely nostalgic, but also assessing its present and gazing toward the future. After all, it’s right in the song that these memories lose their meaning when I think of love as something new.

And though I know I’ll never lose affection for Grandma Jean, or any of a cast of others whom were closest and dearest to me at different points in my life, when I think of them now, I imagine less reliving what we would do long ago, or telling them about my life since we were in each other's and asking about theirs. I think, first and foremost, that I wish they could know Riley. Just as I had them in my life, I wish Riley could have them in his life, too.