A couple of months ago, I posted a poem that my grandmother had written long ago. It was about children’s handprints on the wall but it was really about so much more. (See October 13, 2020 post.)

My grandmother understood heartache and loss and grief. She used to tell me about going to sleep in the same room with a family member who had just died when she was a child. She said it seemed normal – death was not sanitized nor sent away to be handled by professionals. She would have been about 8 years old during the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1920. Death was everywhere, inescapable.

My grandma loved greatly and with that comes great eventual grieve. This poem of hers touches on that grief, a universal pain shared by all. Somehow all the pain she experienced in life did not turn her into a cynical person. It made her very loving and understanding.