We’re never with them as much as we’d like, especially as they get older. Suddenly they’re at school more. Or want to spend time with friends. Life intervenes, too. Work takes us away. Marriages don’t always work.

This breaks our hearts. We miss our kids so much.

But it’s worth remembering that we always have them. We quoted that song from The National recently and it’s worth quoting again because it has some beautiful observations about love and family and that missing, aching feeling we get. As he cycles through a bunch of both mundane and hilarious memories of his wife and daughter, Matt Berninger explains that this is basically how he stays close to these people—whom his job almost certainly takes him away from. “I flicker through,” he says of the memories, “I carry them with me like drugs in a pocket.”

So while we don’t have our families as much as we like, as inevitable as partings are, as constant as the missing is, we do get to carry them with us—we can “keep what we can” of them, as he says in the song. They are like drugs in a pocket, happiness on demand.

Little memories that never leave us. There when we need them.  A kind of happiness we can reach for—anytime.