This Grandparents' Day, the World Health Organization's latest advice offers one more reason to spend a little longer around the family table.
Grandparents often have a remarkable ability to ignore the laws of time. A visit that's supposed to last 20 minutes somehow stretches into three hours, partly because they delight in refusing to answer a simple question with a simple answer.
Ask what they had for lunch and, before you know it, you've traveled via the butcher who retired in 1987, the neighbor's new dog, your cousin's holiday in Spain and an entirely unrelated story about the time your father got stuck in a tree. And somehow... you don't really mind.
Every family also has that story. You know the one. The story everyone can recite almost word for word because Grandpa has told it so many times that the grandchildren now supply the sound effects. The strange thing is that nobody ever seems to get tired of hearing it quite as much as they pretend.
And it turns out those wonderfully meandering afternoons may be doing far more than preserving family folklore.
This week, the World Health Organization shared a refreshingly simple message: spending time with other people and keeping our minds active may help reduce the risk of dementia. Their advice wasn't particularly complicated. Stay curious. Stay social. Keep your brain engaged.
If you think about it, grandparents have been recommending exactly that for decades!
Not because they read the latest medical research, but because they've always understood that conversation isn't something to squeeze between more important things. Conversation is one of the important things.
That's why they ask questions nobody else asks anymore. They want to know whether you're sleeping well, if you're eating properly, whether work is making you happy and why on earth you've stopped wearing the sweater they knitted you 10 years ago. They remember things about us that we've long forgotten ourselves, and they somehow manage to make us feel that our lives are worth listening to.
A mutual benefit
Perhaps that's why we often think we're doing our grandparents a favor by dropping in for a chat, when the truth is rather more mutual. If those long conversations and games of cards really do help reduce their risk of dementia, as the WHO suggests, then sitting at the same table, laughing at the same stories and searching together for the answer to 17 Across is probably doing our own brains some good too.
Pope Francis often called grandparents the "keepers of memory," and the phrase becomes more beautiful the longer you think about it. He wasn't talking simply about remembering names or birthdays, but about something much richer. Grandparents remember the stories that explain who we are. They remember the people we've lost, the faith that sustained the family through difficult seasons, and the little moments that would otherwise disappear forever.
And who knows, one day, perhaps without even noticing, those stories will become ours to tell.
Which is why this Grandparents' Day, flowers are lovely and chocolates rarely go to waste, but your greatest gift may simply be your time. Sit down. Let the conversation wander. Laugh at the story you've heard a dozen times already. One day you'll realize it was never really about the story. It was about keeping the memory alive together.
