This Chapter is for Grandma
On this day in 2012, I published The Thank You Room, the story of my sarcoma diagnosis, surviving it, and having a healthy baby at the end. (That healthy baby is ten as I sign the book below.)
“Not a great book at all—but mine, mine, mine,—something to which I had given birth—something which, but for me, would never have existed.”
Each chapter of The Thank You Room is named for a person in my life and how they made the icky year much easier. Chapter 8 is for Grandma.
Her name was Virginia Grubbs, and she left us (for Glory, as my mother says) in the wee s’mas of Easter morning this year. In Chapter 8 of my memoir, she was showing up once a week or so to round up our laundry, fill the boys’ small cups, and hold me as I cried.
She was glorious, kind, and memorable. She told me she was flawed, that she grumbled about all kinds of things and felt blue in the mornings. All that did was make her more glorious in my eyes. It’s nothing to be as wonderful as her if you like the mornings and never feel like grumbling. It’s the rising above that made her such a gem.
I held Grandma’s hand the week before she died, and I cried then, too, but not from sadness. Not yet. That day, I cried from overwhelming gratitude to have lived within her light.
Grandma had four children, eleven grandchildren, including me, and thirty great-grandchildren, including my three boys. I’ve heard she prayed for us every day. I know she taught us to be kind. If you worry about the world, as we all do—Grandma did, too—at least know there are 45 people on earth today who are grieving a kind and beautiful soul, who carry part of her within us, and who dearly hope to do justice to her prayers.
— Grandma, and her faith in me, 2015