A young Cary Clack with his maternal grandmother, Olga Thompson.

While reading the funeral program of a family member a couple of weeks ago, I learned that all four of her grandparents died before she was born. It was difficult for me to imagine a life barren of grandparents, especially for a woman who was an excellent grandmother to her only grandchild.

For those of us blessed with wonderful grandparents, we don’t need National Grandparents Day — which is today — to remember and honor them.

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But it is a good day to be reminded of the roles grandparents play in the lives of their families and indelible imprints they make on their grandchildren. In a writing class for adults that I’ve been teaching for Gemini Ink, I’ve been struck that so many of the essays by the students, many of them grandparents themselves, have been about their grandparents.

What grandparents do so well for children is create memories that will bequeath to them a lifetime of sustenance and joy. They’re often our first storytellers and the teachers from whom we learn the power of narrative and language.

I had a grandfather and both grandmothers in my life well into my adulthood; two great-grandmothers into my 20s; and a great-grandfather until I was 15 and whose pocket watch I still carry.

My maternal grandfather died when my mother was 3, but I cherish two letters he wrote to my grandmother.

“All day yesterday,” my grandfather wrote in January 1944, “my left eye was jumping. That is why I called you last night to ask about the children. … Papa may close a deal today for a place. If he does, I think the place is nice. We have a space for you and the children now at home but am waiting until a deal is closed so when you come (you) will have a place for our things.”

There were four children; the youngest was my mother. The children and my grandmother were in Houston, where my mother was born.

My grandfather moved to San Antonio to receive treatment for tuberculosis. He was living with his father, my great-grandfather, whose nickname was “Cap” (“The Captain”) because he owned the San Antonio Black Missions, a semiprofessional baseball team in the South Texas Negro League.

Cary Clack in the arms of his maternal grandmother, Olga Thompson.

The place that Cap closed the deal on was a house in Denver Heights. In the second letter, dated March 1944, my grandfather writes to my grandmother, “The time is not long, before we will all be together again, and I will be very happy.”

He’d die in that house in November 1944. I was raised in that house by a mother and grandmother, within walking distance of my great-grandfather’s house and a five-minute drive from my paternal grandparent’s house. I was blessed.

Grandparents have always been essential in the lives of their grandchildren, but never more so than today when, as the U.S. census tells us, 1.3 million grandparents in the labor force are responsible for most of the basic care of co-resident grandchildren younger than 18. So many grandparents aren’t just weekend escapes for their grandchildren. They are lifelines.

But today isn’t just for grandparents to be remembered and honored, it’s also a day for grandparents to remember their grandchildren.

Until this year, I’d never thought about the other side of National Grandparents Day, which is grandparents missing, mourning their deceased grandchildren.

Like many of you, I think of Uvalde every day. Multiple times a day. It doesn’t take much, whether it’s going to a school or seeing families downtown. But what’s happening more frequently is that whenever I see grandparents with their little ones, I think of Uvalde’s grieving grandfathers and grandmothers.

I think of Ellie Garcia’s grandfather, sitting on a park bench in Uvalde’s Town Square in June, staring at her memorial on what would have been her 10th birthday. And I’m thinking about that, now, as this column ends in a direction not steered.

It’s National Grandparents Day, and I want the grandparents of Uvalde to know that just as we’ve not forgotten their grandchildren, we’ve not forgotten them.

Cary Clack was born and raised in San Antonio. In 1995 he was hired full-time as a reporter and columnist. He left the paper to join Joaquin Castro's first congressional campaign, later serving as Rep. Castro's district director. He rejoined the Express-News as a member of the Editorial Board in 2019. In 2017 he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.