I can picture my grandmother in her late eighties, sitting in her apartment looking out the window at the green trees that surrounded her retirement home. It was a small apartment which included a living room with a kitchenette at the end, which could be closed off by accordion doors. In addition there was a bathroom and bedroom which also looked out over the green treetops. Her furniture was utilitarian, as it had always been, except for the huge, ornately carved Medici chest that sat in all its glory on the far wall, the only reminder in the room of her upbringing in a wealthy Chicago family. Her bookcases held leather bound copies of books from her childhood, as well as copies of the three children’s books that she had written to great acclaim. At the foot of her single bed, covered by a white chenille coverlet, was a chest that had been made by her son in high school shop, the same son whose plane had been shot down over Manchuria in 1943 just short of his 23rd birthday.
I visited her often, drawn as always to this person who had filled my life with outings, sleepovers, books, conversation, and a sense of myself as a person, for I was the only child of that beloved son she had lost in World War II. I remember the quiet serenity of that apartment, but most of all I remember the day towards the end of her life when she said something in an almost musing tone as she looked out of her window aerie. In a voice so low I almost could not hear it she said “I am alone now, but I am not lonely,” and she turned to me with look that was not so much a smile as a light. I only hope for all of us that our lives can be something that provides us with a glow that lights us, so that we too when we are alone may not be lonely.