This is the last photo I took with my grandmother. Last week I brought my son home to meet his great-grandmother. The first day we visited she sat up and held him, but the next two days she wasn’t able to get out of bed and so I placed Leif’s carseat on her walker and rolled it up close to her bedside. Without having to sit up, she could reach out and hold on to his foot. She held his foot and he slept, snoring softly, and we talked about how impossibly soft baby skin is. Grandma asked if we’d be home at Christmas, then teared up when she remembered that she probably wouldn’t be with us then. She’d already completed all of her Christmas shopping, gifts wrapped in silver paper and stashed on her closet shelves, every member of her family provided for. My mom, my son and I stood around her bedside and together we were four generations.

Yesterday afternoon she slipped softly away from us, leaving us just three generations again, and we each take up our new place in the chain. Leif was born on my grandparents’ 73rd wedding anniversary, and grandma left us exactly three months later. For three short months, I was part of a family four generations deep. This is the gift that my son gave us, and grandma’s passing is another sort of gift, delivering her out of a body that was failing her and into an afterlife where she won’t have to bear the bone-deep ache of missing my grandfather any longer. My grandparents left behind two children, five grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. Now it’s our turn to carry the family forward, and their turn to rest.