Today would have been the 75th birthday of my beloved Grandma Zelda, who died of lung cancer — after surviving breast cancer — when I was in sixth grade.
My grandmother was beautiful. She met my grandfather as a teenager. A strikingly handsome war hero, my grandfather was the man all the nice Jewish girls in Chicago wanted to land. From what I hear, Grandpa was quite the player until the day he met my grandmother, at which point none of the other girls stood a chance. He was bowled over by her beauty and her kindness, and they married soon after.
I inherited the beauty, for sure. I don’t know what happened to the kindness. Maybe my sister got that.
My grandmother, in the short time I had her with me, taught me a lifetime’s worth of lessons in living, loving and dying with grace and honesty and dignity. And I know she’s spent every minute since her passing watching over me and guiding me. I felt her presence in my life starting the day after she died, and she’s never left my side since.
Grandma, I haven’t had a cigarette in four months now. I know how happy that makes you.
I love you, and I miss you.