I’m in the process of watching my grandmother die. Sometimes it’s a slow descent and other times it’s like falling off a cliff. Small ways she drifts away, big chunks that are suddenly just gone. Each day I hold my breath, just for a moment, and look at my phone to see if I missed any calls or texts from my mother indicating that the time is now and things are at an end.

For the first 18 years of my life, I lived a mere seven-minute drive from my grandmother, who my family calls Grandma, who I call Gram.

Not only was she geographically and physically close, but she was emotionally close. My siblings and I saw her – at a minimum – twice a week because of church activities; more, thanks to her dedication to her family, specifically her grandchildren. When we were little kids, she’d “run” next to the car as we pulled away from her house and you could always always count on her for a warm hug and a listening ear.

In many ways, Gram is a grandmother straight out of a fairy tale: she’ll call you “sugar” in her Southern accent, give you a piece of gum from a little bag in her ‘pocketbook,’ and sing you to sleep at night. Some of my favorite things as a child were having her comb my hair and “scratch” my back, and I loved the way she melted the butter into the syrup before we poured it on our waffles.

Some of my favorite things as a teenager were driving to her house just to sit and talk, spending the night in one of her upstairs bedrooms, and eating her delicious chocolate fudge (and chocolate chip cookies and corn pudding and baked apples).

There was the one night in college when she and I were baking said chocolate chip cookies in her kitchen and I blithely mentioned that my mother – her daughter – had advised us children not to get married before we were 25. She immediately stopped what she was doing and looked at me with her jaw slightly dropped.

“But Amy Lou,” she said (she calls me Amy Lou). “If you meet the right person, it’s going to be hard to wait for sex!”

(When I got married at 24 to a man I’d only known 11 months, she took me out to dinner and said: “see? I told you it would be hard to wait for sex.”) (We hadn’t waited for sex.)

After I graduated college and finally extracted myself from an abusive relationship, it was at Gram’s house that I sought solace. She and I would walk up to the pool in her subdivision and she’d watch me float in the water as I attempted to soothe my broken heart and sew the pieces of myself back together. She held me as I cried and told me about all the love l deserved and would one day find.

She isn’t all peaches and cream, of course. When my mother went back to work and earned her second Master’s degree, Gram all but flat-out called her a neglectful mother. She held boys and girls to very different standards of behavior and, more recently, she spent two years after my divorce holding it against me.

She is human, after all. Hence the dying.

All my life, Gram has made love look effortless. When she welcomes you into her life, it’s with such open kindness that it takes some people slightly aback. You can almost hear their minds saying “but I only just met this person – how can she be this…nurturing?” It hasn’t been conscious, and it certainly hasn’t been with everyone, but I can reflect on my life thus far and see that it’s been a way of interacting to which I’ve aspired. She has been a role model. And, in so many ways, she’s also been a parent.

My friends and I cooked dinner with her - it was epic.

I’ve always been a firm believer that you do not have to have any biological link with a baby to parent them. As I’ve volunteered and nannied and taught, I’ve experienced the bone-deep certainty that a baby could be mine even if I didn’t actually birth it. Gram and I are obviously linked biologically, but it’s from her that I learned all that a heart can do. A heart can expand and grow, pulsing with love for as many people as you wish. A heart can bend to near breaking when watching a loved one suffer. A heart can hold a person so close that you’re unsure where you end and the other person begins. A heart can take one look at a child and know that you are meant to be its mom or dad and that loving it will be one of your life’s greatest achievements

Loving Gram is one of my life’s greatest achievements.

I flew back to my hometown two weeks ago after she had a stroke and it was like falling off a cliff. I was startled out of my determined denial and into acceptance that the days of her giving me back scratches and combing my hair and melting butter into syrup are over. But the awesome thing about life lived until 93 is that I get to do all of those things for her now. I sing her to sleep and give her warm hugs and hold her as she cries. I’ve even added some new activities, like manicures and pedicures and (wheelchair) rolls around the neighborhood.

I feed her, as I know she fed me. I wash her face, as I know she washed mine. And I call her “sugar” and tell her how much I love her and how much more love she deserves. She has emphasized the ‘mother’ in the word ‘grandmother’ and, as her days come to an end, I will walk alongside her with the bone-deep certainty that she is mine.