My first brush with death happened on a Wednesday night in 1987. I was eleven years old, and I know it was Wednesday because my sister was at youth group. I’m not sure where my mom was, but when I answered the phone and heard my aunt ask to speak with my dad, I knew by her voice that something was wrong.

There are very few memories etched as deeply in my mind as the moments that followed her question. I sat in the dark of our dining room, watching my dad in florescent kitchen light take in the news of his mother’s imminent and unanticipated death. I didn’t know what he was hearing, but I saw his shoulders curl forward, his hand cover his face, and the tears of one who was loving and grieving deeply fall. I hadn’t ever seen him cry before that day.

My grandmother was tall and beautiful. She had snow white hair and “laughing hazel eyes,” as was written of her in some paper in her youth, and quoted often by our family. Her kitchen was constantly filled with the smells of her marvelous meals.

My two most vivid memories of her are both filled with light. I’m five or six, and my sister three years older. It’s morning, and my grandpa has already been up for hours. We’re snuggled, the three of us girls, in my grandparents’ bed, morning sunshine filtering through gauze curtains to dance on the bedspread and the familiar picture frames adorning their walls and bureau tops. We’re laughing and talking and warm, and if love were light, the room would have dazzled with it. The room did dazzle with it.

My second memory is in my house–the house of my youth. Again I’m quite young, and grandma is putting me to bed. It’s summer, so the room is still light, and grandma is rubbing my back softly and singing. The memory is soft, like her touch, and cool whites and grays–her hair, the fading light, my pillow on my cheek. I feel safe and loved and the relief from desert heat that only desert-dwellers know.

I loved my grandma, and love her still. I knew her for eleven years, but that was long enough for her love to get inside of me and stay there, to be a kind of spring I still return to. I feel held in the web of my ancestry by her and by my grandpa, their kindnesses an encircling softness that joins with other loves to challenge my fears that life is dark and rough and lonely and cold. I love it that she lives inside of me, too–in my genes, in my memories, in the habits and phrases that got passed down to me from her.

In 1987 I began a lesson that will surely last a lifetime, of learning how light changes when someone you love dies. How their light can feel completely gone, like my eleven-year-old self sitting in all that darkness, watching a different light than I had ever known reveal the world in harsher hues. Death is a fluorescent bulb sometimes, chasing away the subtleties, the filters, the mists that often hide the things we don’t want to see: unanticipated darknesses, dads weeping, beloved things getting taken away.

But time, and the persistence of a love that does not die along with death, have been teaching me a different way to see. They’ve been teaching me that grandma’s light isn’t gone. It’s with me always. It shines in my memories, my body, her children, my son. It shines as I remember her this day, along this path.

To continue along this grid blog path of remembrances, click here. To read my initial post describing what a grid blog is, click here.

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