Jun 10
One Year Ago Today
One year ago today, it was “100 Years Ago Today,” a post I wrote about my maternal grandmother, who would have celebrated her 100th birthday.
I had arranged to take flowers to her grave in Barnwell County, South Carolina. It was the first time I had been to her grave since she was buried their twenty-five years earlier. I don’t know — I didn’t know then and still don’t know today — why I felt such a need to go there. The one hundredth birthday is a milestone, but these days every birthday is something of a milestone. And if we live the way we should, we should treat every single day, every single moment, as a milestone at which something extraordinary can occur.
Sorry, guess I’m dreaming a little too much today.
Of all of my grandparents and step-grandparents, she was the one to whom I was closest. Her death in 1982 was the first major loss I experienced among people close to me.
Often, far more often than I would have expected after the passage of this much time, I think about her and wonder if she’s up there looking down at me. I wonder if she is proud of what she sees.
And yes, I have very serious doubts.
She was a mother and a grandmother. She did things for people who needed help until she was no longer able to do for herself. She was always generous. And those people she loved were fully loved. I still miss that.
I have tried to imagine things she might have said over the course of the past 12 months. I’ve wondered what she would have thought about my accomplishments, largely unimportant as they are, and what advice she would have given me.
But somehow, it has never quite been the same.
