My Year With Proust - Day 354

   Instead of the pleasures that I had been experiencing of late the only that it would have been possible for me to enjoy at that moment would have been, by touching up the past, to diminish the sorrows and sufferings of my grandmother's life.  But I did not remember her only in the dressing-gown, a garment so appropriate to as have become almost symbolic of the pains, unhealthy no doubt but comforting too, which she took for me; gradually I began to remember all the opportunities that I had seized, by letting her see my sufferings and exaggerating them if necessary, to cause her a grief which I imagined as being obliterated immediately by my kisses, as though my tenderness had been as capable as my happiness of creating hers; and, worse than that, I who could conceive of no other happiness now but that of finding happiness shed in my memory over the contours of that face, moulded and bowed by love, had striven with such insensate frenzy to expunge from it even the smallest pleasures, as on the day when Saint-Loup had taken my grandmother's photograph and I, unable to conceal form her what I thought of the ridiculous childishness of the coquetry with which she posed for him, with her wide-brimmed hat, in a flattering half light, had allowed myself to mutter a few impatient, wounding words, which, I had sensed from a contraction of her features, had struck home; it was I whose heart they were rending, now that the consolation of countless kisses was forever impossible.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 785-786

Proust continues to reflect on the memory of his grandmother, and the role that she had played in his happiness and the role that he had at times played in her unhappiness.  Once I proposed that the greatest lesson that your grandparents ever teach you is that, after their death, you learn the hard way that you should have spent more time with them and told them that you loved them more.  It is almost always our first experience with loss, or, as he reminds us, "it was I whose heart they were rending, now that the consolation of countless kisses was forever impossible."