(a couple paragraphs about her grandmother)Nana could put anyone in their place with a piercing look and the determined set of her thin lips. But to me she was the woman who thought I was beautiful. Unsure, as we all sometimes are, of my worth in the world. I remember feeling wonder at the way Nana tenderly stroked my cheek, telling me how beautiful I was. For some reason -perhaps because soft words did not frequently come from this small fierce woman-I believed her. I knew she truly saw me as beautiful, inside and out, and she loved the beauty she saw.
The night of my grandfather's death I went to my grandparents' home and stayed the night. My parents were upstairs in the master bedroom, my grandmother had bedded down on the living room sofa, and I slept in a single bed in the small room off the kitchen. Newly pregnant with my first child and exhausted by the day's events, I was sleeping soundly when the sound of someone entering the room startled me awake in the middle of the night "Nana ?" I whispered, but she did not answer. Ghostly in her pale flannel nightgown, she silently lifted the covers and slid into the narrow bed next to me her small body trembling with cold and grief. Crying softly, she reached out and squeezed my hand, hard. For a moment I couldn't make any sense of it. This was not the grandmother I knew, the perpetual pillar of strength, a force to be reckoned with. This was a woman alone and lost without the husband she had loved for over fifty years. Rolliing onto my side, I stroked her cheek as we talked quietly about my grandfather. The tips of my fingers still remember her soft skin, covered with lines of age, damp from tears. I had not noticed those lines in the daylight. Shocked at seeing my grandmother broken by something life had thrown at her, I could not find the words to tell her what I hoped my touch would: you are beautiful and you are loved.
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