Missing Word

I'm flipping through Laura Bush's book and lingering in some chapters longer than others. In it, she attempts to describe the feelings associated with infertility, miscarriage, and infant death, which touched generations of women in her family. She mentions that in the English language there is no word for missing that which we have never met - such as a woman who yearns for a child.

I need that word today. One of my sisters yearns for a child.

And strangely enough, I'm feeling the loss of family I've never met. My dad's father died at the age of 42. My grandpa was the youngest of 11 children. Eleven children who now would be in their 90s and who had many children and now have many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. My dad's mother had to move her family out of state only a couple years after my grandfather's death. Inter-state communication was not convenient in the 1960s. Now I yearn to know about this part of my family. I wonder what memories we might have made together.