Lois Anne

She was born deep in the spring of 1940, the time of year when green has come to life and the trees are filled with song. She lived a whole big life before I got to meet her—sixty-three years later—when her youngest son drove me north one wintry weekend and showed me into the living room of his childhood home. She was elderly by then, burdened with health issues, fragile on her flowered couch. But her warmth rose up to greet me and my nervousness dissolved. Later that night she called Jeremy “my Stew-baby” as he put his hand on her shoulder in the kitchen and, with his other hand, retrieved some dishes stored far above her head. He laughed.

“I think I’m really in this now,” I told my roommate when I came back into town. “I mean, you should see how he is with his mom.”

We made that northbound trip again and again, her son and I, and she was always waiting at the end of it. Soon enough we brought a baby with us, then another, and then another. She took our children into her arms and she was theirs. Every sound they made was precious to her, every little trick ingenious. She poured out adoration and they lapped it up like puppies.

Our children learned that visits to Grandma’s house meant hours of uncommon attention. She gave them crayons and colored with them at the bar while they watched cartoons together on the little kitchen TV. She handed out butterfly nets at the family campsite and exclaimed over the specimens they ran back to show her. Once she lowered herself down to the floor and helped our daughter make a horse corral out of Lincoln Logs. The getting back up wasn’t so easy.

Always she offered snacks and drinks. She poured grape juice into Tupperware tumblers and taught the kids to click their cups together and say, “Cheers to your big ears!”

Our usually stoic oldest daughter surprised us time and again in those early days by dissolving into tears when it was time to drive home. We had to coax her into the car as she said goodbye, promising her we would come back soon. She’d cry for the first thirty minutes of the trip.

Sometimes we would talk on the phone, my mother-in-law and I, in those quiet and endless afternoons of early motherhood when I felt like I might disappear. I could talk of nothing but these children who consumed me, and she listened eagerly to every detail, marveling at their cleverness, laughing at their quirks. “You’re such a good mom, Amy Lynne,” she’d say, and I’d feel my eyes start to sting.

Because always there came the thought—She’s old and getting older. I’d catch myself trying not to get too close. This will not last forever. Many times I’d watch her with the kids and feel a stab of future sorrow. How will they stand it when she’s gone? Not an ideal way to look at life, it’s true, but when death has walked right through your front door, it’s hard not to expect it back at any moment.

But still we visited and still she loved and the children grew and changed. Our youngest daughter was suddenly tall enough to reach the button on Grandma’s wall clock, so she’d push it over and over and dance across the living room to a music-box version of “Hey Jude” while Grandma clapped and cheered from the couch.

On random Sunday evenings, Jeremy would announce, “I’m gonna call my momma!” and take the phone into the bedroom. Soon his laughter would float down the hall and the kids would all end up on the bed with him, waiting for their turn to talk.

We brought her flowers in the spring and celebrated her birthday and Mother’s Day on the deck behind her daughter’s house, while the sun shone down and her progeny laughed and the green leaves danced with the light.

She’d sometimes be in the hospital and I’d pray and hold my breath. And then she’d be back home and send us birthday cards. “I love you more than all the birds in the sky,” she wrote to our animal-obsessed daughter. “I love you more than all the squirrels in the trees.”

And then September happened, much too soon. The feared future came to meet us and Jeremy and I found ourselves giving our kids the talk I’d been dreading since they first gazed into their grandmother’s eyes. Her days were almost done. They did not take it well.

Another drive up north. Cars were parked outside the house. Our oldest daughter did not hurry up the steps and through the door as she had so many other times. She sat sullenly in the car while I followed the others in to find a hospital bed in the living room, next to the flowered couch. There she lay, weakened and failing but oh-so-happy to be home. We circled her while she cracked her jokes and loved us with her eyes. Our son handed her a crayoned card. It said, “I hope you have a good time. I will never, never, ever forget you.”

Only after much cajoling did our daughter come inside to say goodbye.

I never got to know my mother-in-law when she was young and energetic. But I look at photos and hear the stories her son tells, and there she is as clear as day, accompanying him on the piano as he sings his Kermit the Frog solo in choir class; softly admiring every rock he finds for her on his walk home from elementary school; caring for her lilacs and drinking in the scent as though she’ll never get enough.

I see the way her son loves his children and I know I am looking at her. I see her kindness in his eyes as he nurtures me in ways I never knew I needed. I hear her voice in his love for music and his genuine interest in people.

I’ve seen him now another way, this man brought to a tender halt as he catches the scent of his first spring without her in it. For those she left, it hurts to see that the world can still hold lilacs but not her.

And yet. The children remember. They look at her picture and miss her out loud and their hearts melt for music and furry things. They twirl and chase bubbles across the greenest grass, and there she is, there she is.