I must have been very young when I asked my grandma why she and grandpa slept in separate beds in separate rooms. It was unusual because my parents slept in the same bed, and so did my friends’ parents.

“He snores,” my grandma whispered.

Every summer I went to visit them by myself for a week. My grandpa always got up insanely early at 5 and was out of the house at his favourite coffeeshop (which I never did visit myself) before grandma and I woke up at the more civilized hour of 9. He’d come back after we were finished breakfast and ready to start the day, and then we’d do stuff like to go to Storybook Gardens or Wally World or shopping at the mall. Grandpa also went to bed earlier than us.

Later when I was an adult, they’d moved to a retirement home, and mostly they sat around in their overheated living space watching Lawrence Welk and baseball.

I always suspected that they never really loved each other. Grandpa seemed like such a stick in the mud compared to my vivacious grandma, and I remember when I was 8 or 9 asking my mom if grandma could come live with us when grandpa died. He ended up living a long life, and my grandma was very old herself when he died. I was shocked by how lonely she was after he died. She died within a year. That was my first inkling that perhaps the companionship that comes at the end of a long marriage is something much deeper than the burning love of youth.

I think about my grandparents often when I’m photographing my neighbours. Some of them are in their 80s, and I wish I’d been into this kind of photography when my grandparents were still alive.