My grandmother, Molly Ann Queram, died on the evening of Oct. 6. She was 91.

My grandfather Norman, her husband of 67 years, went before her, two years ago. Losing him felt more orderly to me somehow. The grief was simpler. Losing Moll has been chaotic in comparison—a bin of glass shards, a bouquet of clashing colors, cymbals colliding in a mess of staticky fog. It rolls through me like a thunderclap, flashing slips of memory into my mind unbidden: the green jacket she wore to my wedding, the time I brought my pet bunny to their house for a visit because they were dying to meet him, an email in which she told me she saw a girl driving a car just like mine and it made her “VERY lonesome” for me. I see, out of nowhere, the sunlight in her bedroom in their old house: dust motes suspended over a porcelain figurine of a woman with a blue feather boa, glass perfume bottles arranged artfully on a large mirrored tray that sits, now, on my bedroom floor, waiting to be unwrapped. I see, with a jolt, the stack of jeweled bands on her left ring finger, the ones I would twirl around her knuckle while we chatted, all of them gone missing in the last days of her life.

When I was a baby Moll started telling me that she loved me “to bits and pieces,” and it later became the signoff we used at the end of phone calls and letters. The phrase, dear to my heart, seems somehow cruel now that I am left with only actual bits and pieces of her — her photos and scrapbooks, her jewelry, her carefully curated objects displayed now on shelves and walls throughout my home. I remember most of these items from my past but I don’t know the stories behind any of them (I always ask so many questions and yet there are always, inevitably, so many questions left to ask). I had earmarked in my mind other objects to bring home with me, only to find them missing from her apartment. I wonder now where they are. Maybe I imagined them into being in the first place. Maybe they’re still out there somewhere, forgotten on a shelf in a thrift store or collecting dust on someone else’s dresser.

We leave so much behind when we leave.

heart-handled bell, Moll and Norm’s house, 2010

My grandmother was her own person and I had a relationship with her that was separate from the one I shared with my grandfather, but I find it difficult now to separate the two of them in my mind. It was not like this when he died. I mourned him and I continued on with her and that is probably the difference—he, too, was an unimaginable loss, but half of him was still here, in her. The whole of them is gone now. I am a person without grandparents, which was always meant to be a sad thing but feels insurmountably tragic for me. Because Moll and Norm were so much more than just my grandparents.

High school graduation, feat. Normie and my diploma

One of my most enduring traits is that I do not assume or take for granted the fact that anyone loves me. (I never used to talk about this because it is a difficult thing to explain to people who come from healthy families and who have never been neglected or abandoned in any real way, but the older I get the more I realize that we are all a wreck.) I figure, for example, that my husband feels indifferent to me, even though I know, both logically and in my heart, that he loves me fiercely. I assume that my parents, both of them, could take or leave me without much thought, to the point that I am surprised when either of them praises me or says something nurturing. I use these examples not to cast blame toward these three people (they are kind and decent and, in the case of my husband especially, have bent over backward to demonstrate their love for me), but to lay the framework for the importance of this next statement: I never felt that way about my grandparents. Their love was just a given — like oxygen, or blue skies, or the warmth of the sun. It was bedrock. No matter what, I could call them or show up at their door and know without a doubt that they would only be thrilled to have me. Even now when I think about their little duplex — cozy and golden-hued, golf on the television, newspaper spread on the sofa, pie in the oven — something in me catches and then relaxes, like a big exhale or stepping into a warm summer evening after sitting for hours inside of a cold office.

There is not a single place on this earth that makes me feel that way now. There may never be a place that feels that way to me again.

In spite of the upheaval I feel, I know that this is the natural order of things. Grandparents are supposed to die in your lifetime. I know that. I knew that. I used to think about it a lot when I was younger, actually — I would sit by Moll and Norm at Christmas and think about how much I loved them and try to soak it in in case it was the last time I ever saw them. I anticipated it, I guess, but even so I find myself totally disoriented by the reality of its aftermath. Last weekend I was sitting in the sunlight watching my daughter play in the yard and thought, fleetingly, “I should call Moll.” It only took a second before the truth caught up with me but that moment, full of warmth and possibility, threw me back to all that time before, when everything felt simpler and they were always there.

Because: they were always there.

After my grandpa died Moll changed, because of course she did. I still called her regularly, but over time, the conversations stopped feeling like me and Moll. My sunshiney grandma, a self-proclaimed eternal optimist, was for the first time in her life really sad and really depressed, even though she tried not to talk about it. Her life shrank accordingly, first to the walls of her assisted living community, then to the walls of her apartment, and then further, to her tiny couch. This was at the start of the pandemic and my world had become tiny too, but it was unclear to me how much she grasped what was happening, so we found no common ground there. Her short-term memory faltered, so every phone call consisted of four or five repetitions of the same few minutes of small talk — me telling her the twins were good and her assuring me that she was fine.

I never made a decision to stop calling. I just put it off until tomorrow, again and again, knowing all too well that I was not guaranteed another chance. It was selfish and cowardly and I knew it, but it was so hard to talk to her and still feel like I hadn’t reached her. The last time we spoke on the phone she ended the conversation by saying, “Call anytime. We may not have much to say to each other, but I still love to hear from you.” That seems so sweet and lovely to me now, but at the time it broke my heart because Moll and I had never not had things to say to each other. It cracked me open a little. So I skirted it. She called me a final time in September, but I was half-asleep and didn’t answer. She didn’t leave a message and I never called her back. The following week, my father called to tell me she was being moved to hospice.

I booked a flight back to Wisconsin and spent the next six days sitting at her bedside, holding drinks to her mouth, applying Chapstick to her cracked lips and playing Sinatra while she drifted in and out of sleep. I took breaks only for meals and trips to her apartment to help pack up her things (a ghoulish, terrible task — sorting through her thoughtfully placed belongings, making huge piles to throw out and others to donate, all while she slept, oblivious, just a handful of miles away). When I first got there she did not seem to recognize me. She mostly ignored me and talked past me, speaking only to my father, and when she did engage with me it was clear that she thought I was a nurse. Maybe, I thought, she was angry at me for my behavior over the past year, at how I had slipped away from her. I fell apart. I called Brandon, sobbing.

I do not know how to exist in a world where Moll is not excited to see me, I told him. I should have come sooner.

But my second visit was better. When I walked in she said, “Gosh, you remind me of Kate,” and I laughed and said, “Moll, I am Kate!” and just like that she knew me. It wasn’t the same, but it was what I needed. She was in there, still, and that meant I could be there with her.

And yet, the truth persists: I should have come sooner.

Throughout those six days there were flickers of her and me, of love and recognition. The most profound occurred on an afternoon when, after days of insisting that she was fine, she finally admitted that she was in pain. I was there by myself and had to navigate the waves of her agony while I tracked down a nurse to administer the medication, and then again while we waited for it to kick in (“Can I take a pill or something?” she cried, squeezing my hand, and I said, helplessly, “You took one, honey, we just have to wait for it to start working”). I stayed until I was sure she was comfortable and when I went to leave I kissed her on the forehead and said, “You’re just my favorite.” I watched the light flood back into her eyes as she widened them and smiled knowingly.

“Oh, you’re my favorite, too,” she said. “That goes without saying.”

I cried a little as I told her, “I love you to bits and pieces.”

She nodded. “To bits and pieces,” she replied. It was one of our last interactions.

By the time I left Wisconsin, she was spending most of her hours asleep. She did not wake up when I said goodbye to her for the last time.

I do not really believe in an afterlife, but I also don’t feel like she is simply gone. I know that people who depart us here live on in our hearts and maybe that’s what I mean, but it feels...different, somehow, like a thread connects us still. Before I left Wisconsin I knew exactly what day she would die — the same way, maybe, she would know it was me calling before she picked up the phone. “You and me, we’re on the same wavelength,” she would say. On the day I bought the ticket to come see her I was crying alone in my living room and suddenly smelled, clearly and unmistakably, my grandfather’s aftershave. These facts feel sacred to me and I cling to them, which I guess is normal because in the absence of the person who loves you best, the instinct is to cling to something. When I cry I sometimes picture them nearby, on the periphery just out of sight, arm in arm, still just wanting the best for me. In her obituary (a struggle for me, in so many ways), I wrote that “there is comfort now in the hope that wherever they are, they are together.” It’s what we’re left with, ultimately: the comfort in hope.

Still, I am a mess. You are supposed to “take time to grieve,” but you can’t schedule grief (I know because I tried and it still bowled me over, unannounced, in the early light of a crisp Monday morning). And there is no time for it, anyway. There is no moment in my life that is mine alone. There is no hour that I can block off to sit alone with my feelings. Nothing stops. Except her life.

Her death, and my experience of it, has not belonged to me alone. It became quickly intertwined with family drama, longstanding hurts that have festered for years and finally came uncorked, which has made grieving even more complicated because I have not been able to sort through all of my emotions and pluck the pure sadness from the rest of the lingering animosity. I cannot set aside this hurt or that pain and say, clearly, whether it is hers or theirs or mine. Even my grief is not my own. I resent this, maybe more than I have ever resented anything. It has all left me stripped bare. I have no time for acquaintances or petty grievances and I lack the energy to even pretend to care about pretense. I cannot spare a thought for anyone who does not love me — not after losing her, and him, and them. Everything that is not a labor of love is not worth the labor. It all pales in comparison.

I believe that I would have found Molly Ann in this world no matter what. I believe it’s simply a lucky twist of fate that I got to be her granddaughter and to have had the privilege of knowing her love for the entirety of my life. Our bond was special and I have always carried it close to my heart, without ever feeling the need to pull it out and show it off to the world at large. I know so many people who never call their grandparents and don’t think about or know them as people and I never say a word, even if I can’t understand it. It is only now that Norm and Moll are both gone that I feel the need to speak about it endlessly, to make sure people know it existed, to grab them by the arm and say, “Do you know what it’s like to be loved like that? I was loved like that.” I feel a responsibility to make sure that people know about them, about my grandpa’s hugs and how he came around to saying ‘I love you,’ about my grandmother’s quiet style and good taste and how she would hold my hand whenever we sat together to have a long conversation. I need you to understand, I think, but I rarely ever say anything, because, truthfully, I don’t know how to make you understand. It’s a feeling, more than anything, and it seems defined now mostly by its absence and the void it left behind. And it’s impossible to describe a vacuum. Its very existence is nothing.

I don’t know how to stop talking about this because I can’t wrap it up nicely in a bow. It comes in waves and every time one catches me I don’t think I will ever stop crying. I know this is normal. I know grief goes on and on. I know that not a single story in the entire universe ever had an absolute beginning or ending, only moments where we tune in and then tune back out. Even when we aren’t looking, the story goes on and on.

When I was little, Moll used to tell me stories about people I never met and things that happened before I was born. She always framed that time period as “when you were just a twinkle in the sky” — like I was always there, part of her story, sparkling and looking down and waiting for just the right moment to burst in.

I like to think that maybe that’s where she is now. Up there, and also in here. Before, and forever.