Grief is an honest place. I don’t know where my ego goes, but it stops trying so hard; I’m easier with things.

Gma’s memorial was the seventh at Miller-Woodlawn. It was short and functional. The minister did not know her so he recounted what he’d learned from my family. I don’t connect so easily that way, so I focused on the pictures of her displayed at the front of the room and thought about some things that defined my memories.

If I were to have spoken, I would have talked about her sense of humor and playfulness. How my mom and she and I used to drive down to the A&W drive-in in our bathrobes. Or, I remember how she pulled a last-minute gag pose in one of my aunt’s wedding pictures. And, amazingly, the lightening-quick one-liners from her bed at Northwoods Lodge just weeks ago. My family is stocked with goofy people; no doubt we inherited the goofiness, in part, from her. It’s my favorite thing about us.

The other thing about gma is that she always took care of me. The list of ways is long, but the most significant matter is that when my mother died, my gma, then in her sixties and newly retired, took on the task of raising another child. When other people her age were free from the workday schedule and taking long-awaited vacations, she gave me a stable home. I am old enough to know what a burden that was and, thankfully, I had the opportunity to tell her that I deeply appreciated all that she did. Of course, when I told her, she said she never thought of doing differently.

Two generations apart, it wasn’t easy for us to communicate or understand each other’s motives a lot of the time. She was not an expressive person, which was hard for me, but she cared for me the best way she knew how. In really difficult times, when I was depressed and not eating and avoiding the daylight, she coaxed me to eat by bringing home chocolate cakes (which I ate—some days that was all I ate) and she stayed up until two or three in the morning with me playing Scrabble, or Double Solitaire, or Boggle, or Rummy, or any game I wanted to play.

After the memorial, my family gathered at Fred and Nancy’s house. Some of us looked at pictures and told stories. Nancy remembered that the incident involving my drunken father and Kerry, the one that led to a restraining order against my dad, involved a broken window. May said that after grandpa died, the first thing gma did was have someone remove the woodstove and install electric heating. When they removed the stove, they discovered that much of the interior of the wall behind it had burned out.

At dusk Bob and Rose and Fred, Nancy, Katie, and I took all the flowers from the memorial to the gravesite. We laid them out and stood back to let the weight settle. They comforted each other in nuclear huddles. For just a second, I stood there alone and felt that old, old loneliness of not having parents. And now, not having gma. But my aunt and uncle saw me and reached out. I’m so glad for that. It’s such a big hole where my parents were. That moment has been the toughest; I’ve missed so much having a parent to call and visit and intrude.

Yesterday, Bob, May, Fred, and I emptied the storage locker that held gma’s belongings. It was not as hard as I thought it would be. Seeing the quotidian and essential objects of home and the treasures gma kept buried in her cedar chest was joyful. But the rending of a home is a sad thing. When the truck was loaded—her bed, dresser, bookshelves, and lamp peaking above the wall of the truckbed—I knew that I’d never again think trucks piled high with belongings simply mean someone is moving across town. (It’s not just gma who journeys like this, we all do, and that hurts too.)

Among the items I collected yesterday were all the letters I wrote to her from college and Korea. Some were e-mail messages she’d printed—she saved them all. Reading them, I can review a decade of our relationship from a wiser distance. This is the bounty.