My great-grandmother died in a blizzard.

I didn’t know her as well as I should. But I knew her by the big, crowded thanksgiving celebrations where people were sprawled anywhere, plates in hands. I knew her by her quiet laugh and her face, somehow nearly untouched by wrinkles. I knew her by the grey-haired boy who she used to take in when he couldn’t stay at home, who wrote and sang songs for her when she was close to the end.

I wasn’t sad right away. Just detached. Floating. I cried, but they didn’t feel like my own tears. Nope: someone else’s. But my body didn’t know that, so I felt them anyway. I fought hard, but deep crescents in my palm were not strong enough to keep them away.

I got to hold her hand. It was so soft and fragile, like a newborn’s. She was asleep, but she knew I had come in. She saw me and my mom and my brother and my sister and my grandma and my grandpa, and felt her medications kicking in, and fell asleep underneath the wooden cross on her wall. Who could blame her? That was when she was still in her own bed in her own room in her own house. But she was sick.

She waited a long time. She waited through the war, through marriage, through five children. Through countless grandchildren and still more great-grandchildren. She waited while we all made our way through her house like the saddest parade.

We waited too. Through the drive home, through days of nothing, through news of a priest’s visit, through her move to hospice.

Then one Thursday, snow began at dusk, swirling around my own house in big flakes so that only streaks of the world showed. We got the call the next day.

I like to imagine her lying there, a small being in the middle of a bubble in the middle of a swirling vortex of unique crystals and thinking Yes, now. And letting go.