This is a very short story about my two children. One is Jason, by now close to 45, and Nedra, who, last I was able to put the pieces together, is nearly midway into her 30s. You will immediately have gathered that I’m estranged from them both, something no father wishes to say aloud, but in this case I must. This estrangement is compounded by the fact I haven’t heard from their mothers in decades, which I know borders on the incomprehensible.

That said, I will tell you what I know, or what I think I know, mostly because Nedra’s teen daughter, Corinne, has taken pity on me, her lost grandfather, and given me the most threadbare of details.

Jason is a businessman who settled in London largely to remain close to his mother, a dynamic British journalist who has in recent decades led two British daily newspapers as well as working in New York at what some consider the most prestigious daily in the world.

Though she withdrew from me, I was able to follow and appreciate her meteoric ascent. No doubt Jason picked up his verve and drive — those are the words Corinne uses — from his ferociously dedicated mother.

Jason has been married and divorced, apparently from a woman he met in Los Angeles while shoring up funding for a movie deal.

Jason adores film and at one time wanted to be a director, but he later turned his focus to accumulating wealth and securing his status and position. I’d like to think he took his love of film from his father, a kind of New Age genetic hand-me-down, since film has always been a large part of my life. Unlike money, which mattered to me only so long as I had enough to live and dine out. Jason’s mother very probably warned him of this side of his phantom father’s character, and after dabbling in the usually cash-resistant arts, he set aside a poor man’s creativity for a wealthy man’s moving and shaking of players and deals.

Jason would not recognize me if he saw me, nor has he shown any interest in tracking me down, because, I am told, he considers himself disowned, or perhaps more accurately, co-conceived by a man who wanted him expelled before he even set foot on the planet. His mother has told him these things, I know, and sufficient time has passed to moot any debate. I have no say in Jason. I never did.

I should know far more about Nedra, since it is her daughter, my lone granddaughter who has served as my mole. Yet I know next to nothing. Corinne will not speak of herself in detail, preferring instead to dwell on Nedra’s stubborn mother, a woman I remember with vivid fondness. It was she who found Nedra’s name, from a character she liked in a novel she had read before we met. Her father was an academic, a Milton scholar, and it was he who scorned me for my reluctance to take his daughter fully into my fold. We were never married, and Nedra, like Jason, was no doubt weaned on the idea of near-total paternal absenteeism. My sense is that Nedra, too, imagines her father as a ghost, an absence, if not a barrier to her essence.

Corinne let slip that Nedra has lived in Chicago, in Korea, and in Mexico City, Corinne’s birthplace. Her father is Mexican, a diplomat and an ambassador. This father knows little or nothing of my existence, hewing to Nedra’s wish to keep me at bay if not erase me altogether. Again, I do not begrudge her this harshness. If I wanted, I could dispute Nedra’s view of the facts, facts she gleaned, like Jason, from her mother, but once again the passage of time has worked its “out of sight, out of mind” magic.

So then, I have two capable, no-doubt exceptional adult children while at the same time having no children at all — only a granddaughter who at times I consider a creature midway between a gift and a figment of my imagination. Corinne’s sweetness, situated as it is at the core of a void, leaves me pinching myself with gladness, awaiting her next communication, longing at times to tell her to please sneak out and visit me, because I am losing my vision and soon will have no chance even to make out her outline.

But she won’t come, I know. And lately I have heard less and less, as if my age has begun to conspire with my mind to blot her out.

Rightly, you may at this point demand the “why?” of such a story. You may even disdain a father who has not gone further than I have to meet his children, no matter their protests.

But I cannot.

Jason was aborted in 1979. Nedra nine years later. Corinne feels spectral because she is. Neither mother-to-be wanted a child by me and was given the news only after all was done, clinically tied up, completed.

I do not write this in search of a polemic or to assert a position. The would-be mothers lived well and prosperously in my absence, making rich lives of their own.

I write this only to say I have not forgotten, hoping Jason and Nedra will one day put aside their rancor, and, like compassionate Corinne, find time to position themselves by my bed and, however briefly, whisper into my ear.