My grandfather still prays every name aloud. Every evening before bed, he sits in his chair by the window and works through a long, unhurried list — neighbours, old friends, grandchildren, strangers he has met only once. We can hear him from the hallway, his voice low and steady, pausing between names the way you pause between beads on a rosary. The list has taken him decades to build, and I am fairly certain no one alive could fully reconstruct it. It is too long. It belongs entirely to him and to God. But some of those names are ours, and knowing that — knowing he speaks our names into the dark every single night — is something I have never quite been able to let go of.
That memory came back to me when I read the message Pope Leo XIV released on 15 June 2026 for the Sixth World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly. The theme is taken from the prophet Isaiah, and it stopped me when I first read it: “I Will Never Forget You” (Isaiah 49:15). Not a slogan. Not a theme chosen for a poster. A promise — the kind that does not bend under the weight of time or silence or distance.
Isaiah pushes it even further. “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15). And then this: God has engraved our faces on the palms of his hands (Isaiah 49:16). Not written. Not typed somewhere and saved. Engraved. The word matters. It means it cost something. It means it cannot simply be undone.
I think about that word whenever I think about a woman I once visited in a small house on the edge of the city. She had a faded photograph of her children beside a statue of the Sacred Heart. As we spoke, she held the picture gently and said, almost to herself, “They call when they can.” Then she paused. “But what I miss most is hearing someone knock on my door.” She was not bitter. That was almost worse. She had made a kind of peace with it, the way people make peace with things they should never have had to accept. Her quiet resignation was its own kind of heartbreak.
Her words echo the lament of Israel, the one Isaiah records before God’s answer arrives: “The Lord has forsaken me; my Lord has forgotten me” (Isaiah 49:14). That is not a dramatic cry. It is a tired one. It is the sound of someone who has been waiting too long and has stopped being surprised by the silence. And God’s response is not an explanation. It is not a reason or a theology. It is a vow: I will never forget you.
This year, the World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly falls on Sunday, 26 July 2026, the feast of Saints Joachim and Anne – the grandparents of Jesus. Their names appear only briefly in tradition, but what they did quietly outlasted everything. They raised a daughter in faith, in ordinary daily love, without knowing where it would lead. That is what grandparents do. They plant things they will never see fully grow. They hand on faith the way a baker hands on a recipe – not in a document but in the doing of it, in the smell of the kitchen, and in the patient repetition of small and holy things.
Pope Leo XIV speaks honestly about the loneliness many elderly people carry. The long days without visitors. The care facilities where a person can feel reduced to a room number. The particular grief of outliving the world you once belonged to. He does not smooth any of that over. But he also says something that I keep returning to: that fragility, honestly accepted, can open a person rather than close them. Saint Paul wrote it plainly from his own hard experience — “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). Old age, in God’s hands, is not necessarily a story ending. Sometimes it is the place where the truest part of the story finally begins.
The Pope asks the young to revive something simple — the habit of visiting. Not a program. Not an initiative. A visit. A slow conversation. Staying long enough that the other person stops being polite and starts being real. These things are not complicated, but they are increasingly rare, and their absence leaves a mark that no phone call fully covers.
My grandfather is still at it tonight, I have no doubt. Sitting in that same chair, working through that same long list, pausing between names the way he always has. Slowly. Deliberately. As if every person deserves that small dignity of being spoken to aloud.
He is practising something, I understand now, that he learnt from somewhere much older than himself.
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The author is the director of the Institute of Indian Culture, A Research Centre in Anthropology and Sociology, Andheri East, Mumbai.