Last night I woke up around 3 a.m. thinking about my children.  Not my children as they are today, but my children as they once were.

I could see all three of them vividly: Adin at eight, Asher at six, and Dafna at two.

We were living in Israel then. It was 1978. I was 33 years old and Arianne was almost 30. Israel was a different country in those days. We were struggling to make a life there and, a year later, we would leave for the United States. Looking back, those were not easy years. Yet they were wonderful years.

They were wonderful because our children were young, and we were young parents. The days often felt long, but the years passed with astonishing speed.

Now that I am in my eighties, I find the past visiting me more often. Sometimes it arrives unexpectedly and with remarkable clarity. I don’t just remember those days, I almost relive them. For a few moments, late at night,  I am back there again. But then I remember that there is no way back.

Today my sons are in their mid-fifties. They are parents themselves, raising children who are now young adults and, in one case, still a teenager. My beautiful daughter, Dafna, left us in 2019. She never had the chance to experience the joy of becoming a mother herself. I miss her every day.

I wish there were a way to return to those earlier years, even if only for a moment. Thankfully, I have photographs that help keep those memories alive. Today’s parents have even more. They have thousands of photos, videos with sound, and countless digital traces of family life. Soon, perhaps sooner than we imagine, artificial intelligence will be able to create convincing digital twins of the people we love.

I wonder what it will feel like to sit across from a digital version of my eight-year-old son, or my six-year-old son, or my two-year-old daughter. Would it bring comfort? Joy? Sadness? Some combination of all three? I can barely think about that possibility without my thoughts turning to Dafna.

Then my mind drifts even further back. I think about my own childhood and about my parents when they were scarcely older than children themselves. My mother was just eighteen when I was born. My father was twenty-one. My grandmother was thirty-eight. Her mother, my great-grandmother was sixty-six when I took my first breath.  She was 92 when Adin took his first. Five generations were alive at the same moment. While there is a good chance that I can become a great grandfather, I think being a great great grandfather is out of the question.

I wonder why these memories are so vivid now.  Perhaps as we age, the distance between the past and the present somehow shrinks.  Perhaps our memories become stronger but most likely because our sense of the present becomes weaker and the future? Let’s not speak so much about that.

I am also grateful that the wonderful mother of my children, Arianne and I share the memories of our young children with me. Her memory is much more vivid about that time then mine.

Thankfully, the people we loved, the places we lived, and the children we raised never really leave us with the exception of those that suffer from memory loss.  I mourn their loss.

I love my children. But sometimes, especially at three o’clock in the morning, I miss my kids.