Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning.

With the turn of the weather two weeks ago, the end of the semester last week, and the impending Christmas break, I am reminded at every turn of Christmas breaks from my childhood. It is this time that I miss my grandmother the most -- the time when her absence, and growing dimentia and cancer become realities. She is here but missing. In the room but not present. She is ever dissolving, hanging onto less and less each day.

I think about my grandmother on most days, and on the days I don't I remind myself in a guilty huff of her reality. My sister and I spent a lot of childhoods with her, and she has certainly shaped us in unimaginable, endless ways. Yesterday I received a Christmas package from my Aunt Marty, which contained some lovely presents, the best of which was the note she included. In it, she referred to Gram's frustration that she can't remember anything anymore, though Gram still loves hearing the stories of our family and the holidays, birthdays, and vacations we spent together. I imagine her listening to Aunt Marty tell stories while Gram listens, where she herself is a character, experiencing all of the memories being made in the story. I am comforted thinking of Gram picturing the memory being made, it becoming the character's memory, and then becoming her own.

I find peace thinking of Gram's inner most heart -- that place that is still untouched by disease, age, forgetfulness, and pain. In that heart is the grandmother of my memory, where I am a little girl building mudpies, baking, laughing, crafting, and she is wise-cracking, teaching, and laughing with me. I have to believe that this inner heart is where gram's comfort lies, and while her body blisters, and grows tumors, and punishes her with unimaginable pain and discomfort, she is able to return to her heart's sacred playground, where we are together again, and she is free.