Passed Away Grandmother Quotes

I know there's no way I can convince you this is not one of their tricks, but I don't care, I am me. My name is Valerie, I don't think I'll live much longer and I wanted to tell someone about my life. This is the only autobiography ill ever write, and god, I'm writing it on toilet paper. I was born in Nottingham in 1985, I don't remember much of those early years, but I do remember the rain. My grandmother owned a farm in Tuttlebrook, and she use to tell me that god was in the rain. I passed my 11th lesson into girl's grammar; it was at school that I met my first girlfriend, her name was Sara. It was her wrists. They were beautiful. I thought we would love each other forever. I remember our teacher telling us that is was an adolescent phase people outgrew. Sara did, I didn't. In 2002 I fell in love with a girl named Christina. That year I came out to my parents. I couldn't have done it without Chris holding my hand. My father wouldn't look at me, he told me to go and never come back. My mother said nothing. But I had only told them the truth, was that so selfish? Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free. I'd always known what I wanted to do with my life, and in 2015 I starred in my first film, "The Salt Flats". It was the most important role of my life, not because of my career, but because that was how I met Ruth. The first time we kissed, I knew I never wanted to kiss any other lips but hers again. We moved to a small flat in London together. She grew Scarlet Carsons for me in our window box, and our place always smelled of roses. Those were there best years of my life. But America's war grew worse, and worse. And eventually came to London. After that there were no roses anymore. Not for anyone. I remember how the meaning of words began to change. How unfamiliar words like collateral and rendition became frightening. While things like Norse Fire and The Articles of Allegiance became powerful, I remember how different became dangerous. I still don't understand it, why they hate us so much. They took Ruth while she was out buying food. I've never cried so hard in my life. It wasn't long till they came for me.It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years, I had roses, and apologized to no one. I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An Inch, it is small and it is fragile, but it is the only thing the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I hope that whoever you are, you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you. I love you. With all my heart, I love you. -Valerie

Blaire, This was my grandmother’s. My father’s mother. She came to visit me before she passed away. I have fond memories of her visits and when she passed on she left this ring to me. In her will I was told to give it to the woman who completes me. She said it was given to her by my grandfather who passed away when my dad was just a baby but that she’d never loved another the way she’d loved him. He was her heart. You are mine. This is your something old. I love you, Rush

The Last Words of My English Grandmother There were some dirty plates and a glass of milk beside her on a small table near the rank, disheveled bed-- Wrinkled and nearly blind she lay and snored rousing with anger in her tones to cry for food, Gimme something to eat-- They're starving me-- I'm all right--I won't go to the hospital. No, no, no Give me something to eat! Let me take you to the hospital, I said and after you are well you can do as you please. She smiled, Yes you do what you please first then I can do what I please-- Oh, oh, oh! she cried as the ambulance men lifted her to the stretcher-- Is this what you call making me comfortable? By now her mind was clear-- Oh you think you're smart you young people, she said, but I'll tell you you don't know anything. Then we started. On the way we passed a long row of elms. She looked at them awhile out of the ambulance window and said, What are all those fuzzy looking things out there? Trees? Well, I'm tired of them and rolled her head away.

There is a plague on grandmothers. The elder relations of my students begin passing away at an alarming rate one week. I want to warn the surviving grandmothers, somehow. I want them to live.

Most people are like this. Something they have made in their minds over and over again strongly prevents them from having a complete life. They are desperately trying to get out of a suffering realm that they have made themselves by becoming blindly attached to sensations. But it doesn’t work that easily. The simple reason for their difficulties is that they don’t understand impermanence. This is the path of human beings’ suffering. Everything in this world happens by natural process. You make everything, so you get everything, which means you get some kind of suffering. “I don’t like getting old.” “Oh, my relationship with him ended. I feel so miserable.” “I hate being sick like this.” “I don’t like him.” “I can’t believe my grandmother died.” We all suffer. But if you correctly attain this insight into impermanence, then you can take away these Eight Sufferings. If you don’t understand that all things are impermanent, however, then you become easily attached to things that must eventually pass. As a result, you cannot take away your suffering, and you only continue to make more suffering for yourself and for this whole world.

I have lived an eloquent sufficiency, any more would have been a superfluous redundancy." My grandfather, Howard Creelman, Sr. always said this to my grandmother, Elaine. It is beautiful. I found this little brown tattered piece of paper tucked away in mmy grandmother's wallet after she passed away. It contained the original quote and simply said, "Howard always said this.

I remember how devastated my granddad was when my grandmother passed away. He wouldn't get out of bed for weeks. When he finally did show up for breakfast one morning, he was so think I could see right through him. He sat down at the kitchen table and said, 'Nothing will ever be the same because she isn't in the world anymore.' That's how I know, how I've always known, that losing what you have is worse than getting anything new.

My maternal grandmother died on December 21st, and her only concern was that we wouldn't find the Christmas gifts that she'd hidden away for the family. Right then, I understood why my mother was such a kind woman - she followed her mother's example and passed that compassion on to her children. My grandmother's example in life became her shining example of a noble death - selfless and caring until the end. While some choose the path unilaterally, for me, kindness is a learned behaviour: teach your children humility by your words and actions, and they will give something to this world and not just take from it.

More often than not, the people around me weren’t simply deciding to give up. They were living in a culture of dependency that had been passed down from birth. My mother and grandmother gave in to the culture. And they expected me to figure out the best way to live on that same track, to game the system and not even try to escape. My friend Ben agrees. 'Most of the time, what you see in the housing projects are generations of families,' he says. 'People accustomed to this lifestyle. It becomes comfortable, so they don’t move away, and even their children stay and raise kids in the same environment.' In neighborhoods like the ones where Ben and I grew up, there is no perceived incentive to advance. After all, the checks for housing and the food stamps and assistance arrive every month. This is why the system must be reformed. Welfare should exist only for a certain period of time, unless you’re disabled and can’t physically work. It should not last for a generation or more. There are millions of jobs open, without enough people to fill them or, rather, without enough people who have the necessary skills and training. This is where the government should come in, providing incentives for real-world training and educating recipients about a life beyond government dependence.

At a talk I gave at a church months later, I spoke about Charlie and the plight of incarcerated children. Afterward, an older married couple approached me and insisted that they had to help Charlie. I tried to dissuade these kind people from thinking they could do anything, but I gave them my card and told them they could call me. I didn't expect to hear from them, but within days they called, and they were persistent. We eventually agreed that they would write a letter to Charlie and send it to me to pass on to him. When I received the letter weeks later, I read it. It was remarkable. Mr. and Mrs. Jennings were a white couple in their mid-seventies from a small community northeast of Birmingham. They were kind and generous people who were active in their local United Methodist church. They never missed a Sunday service and were especially drawn to children in crisis. They spoke softly and always seemed to be smiling but never appeared to be anything less than completely genuine and compassionate. They were affectionate with each other in a way that was endearing, frequently holding hands and leaning into each other. They dressed like farmers and owned ten acres of land, where they grew vegetables and lived simply. Their one and only grandchild, whom they had helped raise, had committed suicide when he was a teenager, and they had never stopped grieving for him. Their grandson struggled with mental health problems during his short life, but he was a smart kid and they had been putting money away to send him to college. They explained in their letter that they wanted to use the money they'd saved for their grandson to help Charlie. Eventually, Charlie and this couple began corresponding with one another, building up to the day when the Jenningses met Charlie at the juvenile detention facility. They later told me that they "loved him instantly." Charlie's grandmother had died a few months after she first called me, and his mother was still struggling after the tragedy of the shooting and Charlie's incarceration. Charlie had been apprehensive about meeting with the Jenningses because he thought they wouldn't like him, but he told me after they left how much they seemed to care about him and how comforting that was. The Jenningses became his family. At one point early on, I tried to caution them against expecting too much from Charlie after his release. 'You know, he's been through a lot. I'm not sure he can just carry on as if nothing has ever happened. I want you to understand he may not be able to do everything you'd like him to do.' They never accepted my warnings. Mrs. Jennings was rarely disagreeable or argumentative, but I had learned that she would grunt when someone said something she didn't completely accept. She told me, 'We've all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don't expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.' The Jenningses helped Charlie get his general equivalency degree in detention and insisted on financing his college education. They were there, along with his mother, to take him home when he was released.

Esme reaches out and laces both her hands round one of Iris’s. ‘You have come to take me away,’ she says, in an urgent voice. ‘That is why you are here.’ Iris studies her face. Esme looks nothing like her grandmother. Can it really be possible that she and this woman are related? ‘Esme, I didn’t even know you existed until yesterday. I’d never even heard your name before. I would like to help you, I really would—’ ‘Is that why you are here? Tell me yes or no.’ ‘I will help you all I can—’ ‘Yes or no,’ Esme repeats. Iris swallows hard. ‘No,’ she says, ‘I can’t. I . . . I haven’t had the chance to—’ But Esme is withdrawing her hands, turning her head away from her. And something about her changes, and Iris has to hold her breath because she has seen something passing over the woman’s face, like a shadow cast on water. Iris stares, long after the impression has gone, long after Esme has got up and crossed the room and disappeared through one of the doors. Iris cannot believe it. In Esme’s face, for a moment, she saw her father’s.

out. This was the turning point: “From this illness, my father never quite recovered.”26 Had there been any possibility of Eleanor’s experiencing the joys or even routine of childhood, that time was now passing. In August, she was sent away to Grandmother Hall’s, and at Tivoli learned that her brother Elliott Roosevelt, Jr., had been born on September 29. She wrote a letter to her father, in which she wished her parents well, offered advice to the baby’s nurse should the newborn cry, then came straight to the crucial question about any child of Anna Roosevelt’s: “How does he look? Some people tell me he looks like an elephant and some say he is like a bunny.”27 Except for one pitiable moment at Half-Way Nirvana when Eleanor identified an Angora kitten as an “Angostura,”28 those aromatic bitters that flavored her father’s liquor, she showed few signs of registering the impact of addiction on their lives. “Little Eleanor is as happy as the day is long,” Elliott convinced himself during the heavy self-medicated month following his accident: “Plays with her kitten, the puppy & the chickens all the time & is very dirty as a general rule. I am the only ‘off’ member of the family.”29

I’ll tell you what’s true,’ said Weston presently. ‘What?’ ‘A little child that creeps upstairs when nobody’s looking and very slowly turns the handle to take one peep into the room where its grandmother’s dead body is laid out–and then runs away and has bad dreams. An enormous grandmother, you understand.’ ‘What do you mean by saying that’s truer?’ ‘I mean that child knows something about the universe which all science and all religion is trying to hide.’ Ransom said nothing. ‘Lots of things,’ said Weston presently. ‘Children are afraid to go through a churchyard at night, and the grown-ups tell them not to be silly: but the children know better than the grown-ups. People in Central Africa doing beastly things with masks on in the middle of the night–and missionaries and civil servants say it’s all superstition. Well, the blacks know more about the universe than the white people. Dirty priests in back streets in Dublin frightening half-witted children to death with stories about it. You’d say they are unenlightened. They’re not: except that they think there is a way of escape. There isn’t. That is the real universe, always has been, always will be. That’s what it all means.’ ‘I’m not quite clear–’ began Ransom, when Weston interrupted him. ‘That’s why it’s so important to live as long as you can. All the good things are now–a thin little rind of what we call life, put on for show, and then–the real universe for ever and ever. To thicken the rind by one centimetre–to live one week, one day, one half hour longer–that’s the only thing that matters. Of course you don’t know it: but every man who is waiting to be hanged knows it. You say “What difference does a short reprieve make?” What difference!!’ ‘But nobody need go there,’ said Ransom. ‘I know that’s what you believe,’ said Weston. ‘But you’re wrong. It’s only a small parcel of civilised people who think that. Humanity as a whole knows better. It knows–Homer knew–that all the dead have sunk down into the inner darkness: under the rind. All witless, all twittering, gibbering, decaying. Bogeymen. Every savage knows that all ghosts hate the living who are still enjoying the rind: just as old women hate girls who still have their good looks. It’s quite right to be afraid of the ghosts. You’re going to be one all the same.’ ‘You don’t believe in God,’ said Ransom. ‘Well, now, that’s another point,’ said Weston. ‘I’ve been to church as well as you when I was a boy. There’s more sense in parts of the Bible than you religious people know. Doesn’t it say He’s the God of the living, not of the dead? That’s just it. Perhaps your God does exist–but it makes no difference whether He does or not. No, of course you wouldn’t see it; but one day you will. I don’t think you’ve got the idea of the rind–the thin outer skin which we call life–really clear. Picture the universe as an infinite glove with this very thin crust on the outside. But remember its thickness is a thickness of time. It’s about seventy years thick in the best places. We are born on the surface of it and all our lives we are sinking through it. When we’ve got all the way through then we are what’s called Dead: we’ve got into the dark part inside, the real globe. If your God exists, He’s not in the globe–He’s outside, like a moon. As we pass into the interior we pass out of His ken. He doesn’t follow us in. You would express it by saying He’s not in time–which you think comforting! In other words He stays put: out in the light and air, outside. But we are in time. We “move with the times”. That is, from His point of view, we move away, into what He regards as nonentity, where He never follows. That is all there is to us, all there ever was. He may be there in what you call “Life”, or He may not. What difference does it make? We’re not going to be there for long!

was just a toddler when my grandmother passed away, and Gamma filled the void by visiting frequently. She never got married, so we became her family. She was a great help to Mom and took care of me, especially when she had to work the late shifts. Gamma pampered me, which was the best part. But at the same time, she sheltered me, perhaps too much.

I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline. Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that went them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves. I drove away from the house of Mable Jones thinking of all of this. I drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones' home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos - the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling housing - and I felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.

I allowed myself to feel sad, to get angry, and to fully accept what I’d truly lost when my mother passed away. It wasn’t just that I missed her—it was also the painful realization that she would never be there again during the important events in my life and that she would never experience the things she’d looked forward to—like retire from her job and become a grandmother.

Stupid dog, do you realize you have actually LITERALLY bitten the hand that feeds you?" Schatzi looks at me with a withering stare, arching her bushy eyebrows haughtily, and then turns her back to me. I stick out my tongue at her back, and go to the kitchen to freshen her water bowl. Damnable creature requires fresh water a zillion times a day. God forbid a fleck of dust is dancing on the surface, or it has gone two degrees beyond cool, I get the laser look of death. Once there was a dead fly in it, and she looked in the bowl, crossed the room, looked me dead in the eye, and squatted and peed on my shoes. I usually call her Shitzi or Nazi. I suppose I'm lucky she deigns to drink tap water. Our bare tolerance of each other is mutual, and affection between us is nil. The haughty little hellbeast was my sole inheritance from my grandmother who passed away two years ago. A cold, exacting woman who raised me in my mother's near-complete absence, Annelyn Stroudt insisted on my calling her Grand-mère, despite the fact that she put the manic in Germanic, ancestry-wise. But apparently when her grandparents schlepped here mother from Berlin to Chicago, they took a year in Paris first, and adopted many things Française. So Grand-mère it was. Grand-mère Annelyn also insisted on dressing for dinner, formal manners in every situation, letterpress stationary, and physical affection saved for the endless string of purebred miniature schnauzers she bought one after the other, and never offered to the granddaughter who also lived under her roof. Her clear disappointment in me must have rubbed off on Schatzi, who, despite having lived with me since Grand-mère died neatly and quietly in her sleep at the respectable age of eighty-nine, has never seen me as anything but a source of food, and a firm hand at the end of the leash. She dotes on Grant, but he sneaks her nibbles when he cooks, and coos to her in flawless French. Sometimes I wonder if the spirit of Grand-mère transferred into the dog upon death, and if the chilly indifference to me is just a manifestation of my grandmother's continued disapproval from beyond the grave. Schatzi wanders over to her bowl, sniffs it, sneers at me one last time for good measure, shakes her head to ensure her ears are in place, like a society matron checking her coif, and settles down to drink.

More often than not, the people around me weren’t simply deciding to give up. They were living in a culture of dependency that had been passed down from birth. My mother and grandmother gave in to the culture. And they expected me to figure out the best way to live on that same track, to game the system and not even try to escape. My friend Ben agrees. 'Most of the time, what you see in the housing projects are generations of families,' he says. 'People accustomed to this lifestyle. It becomes comfortable, so they don’t move away, and even their children stay and raise kids in the same environment.' In neighborhoods like the ones where Ben and I grew up, there is no perceived incentive to advance. After all, the checks for housing and the food stamps and assistance arrive every month.

have a boyfriend, I told her in my head, a small part of me hoping the pieces of her that had been passed down in the blood now rapidly carrying oxygen out of my brain might overhear. I would never tell Mother Bhūmi I was queer aloud. By then, I had imagined that she was sealed off by her own carceral ways of thinking—punitive ideas she heeded that encouraged harming those who did not fit this society’s norms around gender, even if they were family. It wasn’t that she couldn’t understand my queerness or love me if she knew, but I believed that the parts of her that would understand and love me were buried so deep beneath her own pain that they would take years to excavate. Years I knew she didn’t have. Years that had been stolen from her, just like my childhood had been pried away from me. How much could I blame her for what she replaced them with? How much could I blame myself for internalizing self-hatred while trying to find what about me was worth saving in an anti-Black, anti-queer world that hated me, too? How much could I blame Mata? And how much should I hold accountable the world that separated us from our childhoods in the first place and told us that blaming each other was all we could ever do about it? Was it my, my mother’s, or my grandmother’s fault that we were too fractured ourselves to hold every aspect of one another, or did the problem stem from an anti-Black society that wouldn’t allow any of us to exist as fully whole people within it?

Forty-five might seem old to you now, but I promise you it isn’t. I’m not yet half as old as my grandmother was when she passed away. I hope I still have a lot of living to do.

as his grandmother Julia passed away. As young as he was, due to the recognized closeness that the child had

But the ghost of my grandmother—whose name in life was Karinna—has been here for more than thirty years. I’ve searched for her many times since joining with Mauth. Each time, she evaded me, seeking solitude in the deepest reaches of the wood. Now she curls around me like smoke, little more than a shiver in the air. “Have you seen my lovey?” “I know your lovey,” I say, and her head jerks up. She solidifies completely for the first time since I’ve seen her, so clear that I catch my breath. She looks just like my mother. Like Keris. “Your lovey still lives, Karinna,” I say. “But in time, she too will die. She will pass easier if you are waiting for her on the other side.” Karinna is all movement again, bolting away and back in the blink of an eye. “My lovey does not live,” she says. “My lovey died. But I cannot find her anywhere.” “Why do you think she died, Karinna?” I sit on a nearby stump and let her come to me. When she is close enough, I reach out with Mauth’s magic to try to understand what she needs. This is the trickiest part of passing a ghost on. Get too close and they bolt. Not close enough, and they rage at you for misunderstanding them. Karinna doesn’t resist the magic. She hardly notices it. I expect that she’ll ache for forgiveness perhaps, or love. But I feel only agitation from her. And fear. “She’s gone.” Karinna says, and my head spins as I try to follow her ceaseless movement through the trees. “My sweet lovey is gone. If she still existed in this world, I would know. But she wouldn’t leave without me. Never. She would wait. Have you seen her?” “Karinna.” I take a different tack. “Will you tell me how you died? Perhaps if I know, I can help you find your lovey.” Usually ghosts are still thinking about their deaths—even discussing them. But for as long as I’ve been in the Waiting Place, I’ve never heard Karinna say a word about her passing. She turns her face away. “I thought we were safe,” she says. “I’d never have gone, I’d never have taken her if I didn’t think we were safe.” “The world of the living is capricious,” I say. “But the other side is not. You’ll be safe there.

fought back. A lot of it is not in the textbooks, but a lot of people fought back, and they were killed. You never hear about them anymore.’” Then, again, she said, “I lived it.” A silence settled between us, and I kept thinking about her refrain. I lived it. I lived it. I lived it. It echoed throughout the room and became the gravity around us. It crept into my ears and made a home in there. I watched the realization wash over her like a tide had risen around her body. There was so much I had not known about my grandmother’s life until this moment. So many painful experiences that she still carried deep in the marrow of her bones. I thought of how easily these memories might have slipped away with her, had we not sat down—these stories might have remained grains of sand at the bottom of an hourglass. I thought about all of the ways the world today is at once so different, and not so different at all. The exhibits at the museum were not abstractions for my grandparents; they were affirmations that what they had experienced was not of their imagination, and harrowing reminders that the scars of that era had not been self-inflicted. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was This museum is a mirror. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was My memories are an exhibit of their own. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was Always remember what this country did to us. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was Don’t let them tell you we didn’t fight back. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was I did not die. I have somehow made it here when so many did not. I escaped the jaws of

My Italian grandmother did not expect work to be a reflection of her identity. After my grandfather passed away, she did what she had to do to take care of their five children. She opened a coffee shop in a small town in the heel of Italy’s boot and worked there for thirty years. Until her death, she had a single bulbous bicep from repeatedly pulling down the manual lever of the espresso machine. Her identity was straightforward. First, she was a woman of faith. Then a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a fresh-pasta maker. She enjoyed her work at the coffee shop—loved it, even—but it did not define her.

I sat in my little Brooklyn apartment and tried to listen: listen for the voice of my mother, listen for the singsong voices of my grandmothers, both passed away. Jamaica Kincaid taught me that the women I loved might not have been known to many people in the world but they were opera singers. They had beauty in their voices; great dramas were at the cruxes of their lives. And if I could catch those voices - the way they loved, the way they taught, the way they turned their faces away in pain, and how they stood in their own power-then their words on the page might become a song worth singing.

Other than James. I knew if I could win him, I would have everything I ever wanted. A husband, kids.” Her voice broke and she lifted a hand to wipe tears from her eyes. “I told him that your mother had moved on. Said she’d never really cared for him.” Ouch. It wasn’t merely that he’d chosen her Ginny over her mother; Ginny really had stolen him. “I take it Mom had done no such thing?” “She was planning to look for a job in Jacksonville when she got out of college. It’s a long drive, but within driving distance of here. She wanted to marry him.” “But you married him first.” Andie didn’t have to ask; she knew. Ginny had married James the spring that her mother had been a junior in college. “She didn’t come for the wedding, of course. Only Mama. Athena had passed away from an overdose a couple months before, and Grandmother wasn’t healthy enough to make the drive.” They’d originally been from a small town in northeast Georgia. Andie’s grandmother hadn’t passed away until Andie was seven, and she and Cassie had never visited her. She seemed to remember Cassie going to the funeral, though. Alone. “Mama couldn’t forgive Cassie for not coming down for the wedding, especially after losing Athena earlier in the year. She didn’t know what had transpired between us.” That made sense. So Cassie had lost the love of her life, her sister, and her mother all at the same time. Not to mention her other sister dying that same year and her father the year before. No wonder she was

When the company had passed on, Rising Hawk laid the deer carcass on the ground at her feet. “This is for Polly,” he said shyly. “It is unthinkable for a bridegroom to claim his bride without proof of his hunting skill. The deer around here are not well. Your winter must have been bad, like ours. This was the best I could find.” His eyes finally met hers. He was the same, a little haggard. She was older. Neither of them was sure that they read anything in the looks they gave each other. “Gideon gave you my message? I was afraid it would not get here before I did.” “He told me yesterday,” she said, “but he didn’t tell me you were bringing a wedding party.” She was cool, without anger, very polite--as if she were addressing an acquaintance, and a distant one at that. Rising Hawk felt his confidence melting away. “Why didn’t you send word sooner?” she asked, her voice accusing. “I tried, but there was no one to take my message, once I had the courage to try. Anyway, there seemed to be no words for my sorrow that you had not heard before.” “Oh.” He was beginning to think he had made a mistake. This was shaping up as a refusal. And after all the persuading he had wasted on his uncle and grandmother. He glanced down at the deer. It was humiliating, but he hadn’t come all this way to stand here dumb, like a chastened twelve-year-old. Without raising his eyes he said, “I missed you so much my soul was sick. My only dreams were of you. On the winter hunt my aim was terrible, like an old man with fading sight. My friends pitied me. I could listen to stories in the longhouse, but I could not tell any afterward because my heart held no memory of them.” He paused, ashamed to admit it. “I tried drinking for a while.” He saw her start slightly and she said, less harshly, “Me too.” “What happened between us was my fault.” “No, it wasn’t. I said I wouldn’t marry you. What else could I expect? Your only fault was in leaving without saying good-bye. That made it terrible.” “I’m sorry, Livy. I behaved like a spiteful boy.” “Yes, you did.” She agreed much too easily, he thought. She might be more gracious about it.

Grandma's memory had overflowed like a springtime river escaping its banks, and her stories lapped over me. They say a flood makes the world look as it did in the beginning, before the dry land emerged. It seemed to me that her outpouring of memories had dissolved the wide gulf between us and the past, that beside her I could glimpse her grandmother, and her grandmother's grandmother, and all the worlds each of them contained. I had understood how the war severed my grandmother from her everyday life, relegating it to the bygone and the lost, but now I saw it had also carried away her past - not only loved ones but also advice and instructions, proclivities and inside jokes, books and recipes, trinkets and keepsakes, all her rightful inheritance. For a split second, I saw an infinity of forgotten details dancing across history's dizzying expanse. Folded into remembrance is the knowledge of all that cannot be recalled: I realized that when my grandparents passed away, I would carry within me not only the memory of them but the memory of their memories, on an on over the horizon of being, back to the tohubohu before the waters parted.

By some miracle, my grandmother defies his command and opens the door anyway. We stare at our own brown eyes and black curls, hers with silver streaks laced throughout, mine in tangles. I remember all the times we’ve accidentally passed each other on Main Street or in front of Tanson Theater. She always turned away. Now she looks at me, and I feel as if I am meeting myself, forty years from now, and she is facing an image of her wild-eyed past.

So you talked to that boyfriend of yours since he’s been gone, or are you having you some fun times with another fella while he’s away?” I spewed the tea in my mouth and shook my head as I began to cough. How was it she always knew what was going on when no one else did? “Well, who is he? He’s made you spit tea all over my lap. I at least want a name and a few details.” Shaking my head, I turned so I could look her in the eyes. “There is no one. I got strangled on my tea because you asked me such an insane question. Why would I cheat on Sawyer? He’s perfect, Grana.” She made a hmph sound and reached over to pat my leg. “Ain’t no man perfect, baby girl. Not a one. Not even your daddy. Although he thinks he is.” She always joked about Daddy being a pastor. He’d been a “hell-raiser” growing up, according to her. When she told me stories about him as a kid, her eyes would light up. Sometimes I could swear that she missed the person he used to be. “Sawyer’s as perfect as it gets.” “Well, I don’t know about that. I drove by the Lowry’s this morning, and his cousin Beau was out cutting their grass.” She paused and shook her head, a big grin on her face. “Girl, there ain’t a boy in this town who can hold a candle to Beau Vincent with his shirt off.” “Grana!” I swatted her hand, horrified that my grandmother had admired Beau shirtless. She chuckled. “What? I’m old, Ashton baby, not blind.” I could only imagine how Beau looked shirtless and sweaty. I’d almost had a wreck last week when I’d passed the Green’s and he’d been cutting their grass shirtless. It was hard not to look at him. I’d told myself I had just been examining the tattoo on his ribs, but of course I knew the truth. His well-defined abs were really hard to ignore. It just wasn’t possible. Then something about the ink on them made his abs even sexier. “I ain’t the only old woman looking. I’m just the only one honest enough to admit it. The others just hire the boy to cut their grass so they can sit at the window and drool.

I held her hand, knowing that I’d never get to do this again. “I’m sorry for everything, Grandma. I know I was difficult. I’ll try to be better.” “You were always very spirited; I hope all your dreams come true” were the last words she said to me before I left the hospital, a mess, about to take the next step in making those dreams come true, whatever they were now. I landed in Chicago the following day. It was January 2011 and the Midwest winter cut through my bones. Life goes on. When I woke up the next morning, my mom told me my grandmother had passed away peacefully that night. Her last words were “I’m going to miss Becky.” I’d miss her too.

In a twist of magical fate, just before Meg’s grandmother Penelope passed away, Meg and her mother cast a spell transferring Penelope’s soul into the body of a kitten.