What gets lost when you move countries

A Lithuanian woman I know has lived in London for twenty years. Her daughter was born there. Her granddaughter speaks no Lithuanian at all.

She doesn't think of this as loss, exactly. Life moved forward. That's how it goes.

But when I asked her what her own grandmother was like, she paused for a long time. "I don't know," she said. "She died before I thought to ask."

That gap — between the generation that left and the one that never knew what was left behind — is where identity quietly dissolves. Not through forgetting, but through never having learned in the first place.

The stories that close that gap don't need to be dramatic. They just need to be told.