So I’d been thinking about sharing again, but what specifically did I feel like sharing? Well, my grandmother died this past Tuesday. My mom’s mom. The last grandparent.

And it’s that road my mind’s most been travelling the past few days. The hard fact is I was never very close to Grandma Cady. Thelma. (Weird to address her that way.) She was a neat lady, with a simple way about her, but therein lay the problem. For most of my life I simply didn’t know how to talk to her, how to find a way into her world. It was much smaller than mine. Conversations tended to find very short paths. It’s no excuse, of course; I should have tried harder. Fortunately I did feel closer the last couple of years, when she moved to Texas where Mom and Dad could help take care of her. She lived in an assisted-living facility for some time, and did fairly well there, but then she got sick, and we believe suffered a minor stroke. She was never the same after the kidney problems. One of my firmest childhood impressions of her was her ability to talk, all the time, whether anybody was there to hear it or not. She’d get started and you had to judge when was the most appropriate time, after making excuses (or not), to tear yourself away. She just…talked. But after the hospital—not a peep. It was pulling teeth to pull words. Of course it made all the more poignant some of the things she did say, notably the last full sentence she ever said to me, when she would barely speak to others, in response to what I told her when I left the last time: “You take care of *your*self.” That turned me around, and even choked me up a bit, because I knew how much it had to have meant to her to make her speak. I should have said a lot more along those lines, and spent more time with her. I’m sorry, Grandma, and I will take care. You do the same.

Yet it wasn’t so much that I missed the rambling, but a case of me learning too little too late. She was the only grandparent who lived long enough to be present for my adult interest in my family and personal history. I recognized fully far too late the connection I had with and through these people, to a real past that existed. I understood the abstraction before, but had never keenly felt it, and never so much as now, when the last farthest branch is now gone. I tried, while she was still fairly present, to light those dimming paths, but even by then it was already too late. The time for exploring memories was sooner.

And therein lies the spark of rumination. I want to remember. I want not to forget that time, her time…their time. I wish I’d gotten to know the lady who raised my mother better. But she was a simple woman, and not prone to much philosophical ponderings on the past. Her memories were more in the Joe Friday vein: We did this, and then that, and then this other happened. Not much, at least so far as my childhood memories hold, meditating on the events themselves. “I-don’t-know.”

And now I don’t, either. I should have pressed. Because now what I have also lost, and what our country is losing, is our connection to the last full generation of rounded human beings. Gasp! What on earth do I mean by that? I mean on earth that barring global annihilation and the regeneration of human society, there will never again be a generation of people who understood the true nature of life so well. How did they know this better than later generations? Because they suffered for it. They managed what they were largely responsible for creating themselves rather than merely trying not to screw up what they had. But most important, they did create it. They knew how, or they learned it, largely from scratch and tradition. They relied on themselves, their own wits, their own resources. There’s much more ready-made for us today. We have our credit cards, our 110% customer satisfaction guarantee: Get what you need, right now, without having to earn it, and if it doesn’t work out, don’t worry: We’ll spot you.

Is it convenient? Sure. Is it ultimately the individual’s decision? Of course. But it’s a hell of a lot harder to make a bad decision when you don’t get the choice in the first place. Am I saying what I’m saying? Yes, I am, however hypocritical it makes me: Sometimes having an easier choice isn’t the best choice. We have things too easy, and it makes us soft. Nothing new about that sentiment, and it surely sounds like the rumblings of an old crank, but I’m neither old nor cranky. (Well, maybe the latter sometimes, generally when this subject comes up.) What I am is keenly aware of how disconnected from the realities of life that the older of us are becoming and the younger of us, in this increasingly virtual reality world, are never experiencing. How do you ever instill, truly, a sense of proportion about the basics of life and the world to a child when it all comes so easily? Is there still immense, crushing tragedy in the world, in how huge parts of it live? Of course there are, and they’re largely allowed to continue living that way for the very reason I’m discussing. People in the West, in the great irony of progress, have progressed themselves so far that they can no longer relate well to the plight of the suffering. We can’t imagine it, because it’s hard to imagine what you’ve never experienced. It’s no wonder the blind eye given to the wholesale destruction of people in the twentieth century by the despots ruling over them, either directly through murder or the calculated neglect of their welfare. It’s much easier to be a pacifist or isolationist when you can’t truly comprehend the brittleness of life in the vast stretches of Have-Not spread across the globe.

It would surely strike some as a cheap political shot to make such arguments, but where I come from, life is valuable. Life is a moral good. But to understand that one has to be keenly aware of what life truly is, what death represents, what real struggle is like. These were things that our grandparents knew well, because they dealt with it much more directly on a much larger scale than any future generation ever will. They raised their food, and harvested it themselves. They raised the cattle that gave them their meat and milk and cheese, the chickens their eggs, the crops their potatoes and corn and green beans. They shot the rabbits and quail and deer and skinned them and salted them. They dug the wells that gave them their water. They built the homes—*they* did—and strung the fences and plowed the fields and planted the windbreaks that made it possible for them to have the limited measure of life and even more limited amount of pleasure that they did. And they appreciated both like few in any Western country today, or tomorrow, possibly can.

And *that’s* what breaks my heart and makes me lean back uncertainly about humankind’s future course—not just America’s—because we most need people like that to lead the way into a future like ours. It’s no doubt true they wouldn’t comprehend the mind-boggling technology constantly cresting before us, but they’d have something decidedly more important for understanding how to wield it: perspective.

This isn’t to say that struggle automatically begets wisdom, or that the lack of it precludes it. History proves that well enough. But it does make for a more fertile ground, and right now I’d be much more reassured by Thelma Cady’s bit-by-reality “I-don’t-know” than the self-assured “I can’t wait” of a Gen-Nexter in the thrall of the Next Big Thing.