Loving You Was Never Just Keeping You Alive

The greatest love prepares the world for your absence.

My grandmother married my grandfather when she was nineteen and he was twenty-one. They got fifty years. Near the end of hers, while the rest of us were still saying the useless, loving thing (“you’re not going to die, don’t talk like that”), she was doing something else entirely.

She gave me her tennis racket. I was a kid about it. “Grandma, this is your racket. What about when you want to play?” She looked at me like I was sweet and a little slow and said, “Honey, if I can play tennis again, your grandfather is buying me a new one.”

Privately, she turned to him. Fifty years, and she told him he was no good alone. That it wasn’t good for him, and it wasn’t what she wanted for him. She told him he should date. She named the woman he should call. He protested that the woman was already seeing someone. My grandmother, dying, said, “Yeah. She won’t be. Give it time.”