To my boys,
Only one of you got to meet my mom, your grandma, but Christopher, you were too young to remember her. She lost her battle with ovarian cancer when you were just shy of two years old, only three weeks after Evan was born.
She knew you were coming, Evan. She knew what your name would be if you were a boy; in fact, she was the only one who knew. I found out you were growing inside me the same day I found out she was sick. I tried to keep your name a secret, but I had to tell her, wanted her to feel special, to forget for a moment that she wasn’t well. She knew you had arrived, but she never got to see your face.
Twenty-three months later, Logan was born. Logan, you are our only baby who grandma didn’t know about and that felt strange and sad. I will always know how many years she’s been gone based on how old Evan is—this August will be 15 years.
I won’t lie to you, losing my mom and having a baby was hard for me. It still is and maybe it always will be. Maybe that’s why I don’t talk about her much. At times, it didn’t seem fair. But in hindsight, something you learn with age, I can see God’s hand all over that time in my life. I don’t believe in coincidences. The events that occurred surrounding Evan’s birth and grandma’s death were God ordained, but that’s a story for a different day. Today, I want to tell you about the grandma I think you would have had in my mom if she were alive today.
As you know, Grandma lived in New York. She always lived in New York. You could tell by her accent that’s where she was born and raised. She said things like coffee and talk and basically any words that have an aw sound, showing off her Brooklyn roots. If she were alive today, perhaps she would have moved closer to us. Whether she lived close by or not, she would have been a grandma you heard from often, maybe even every day.
I talked to her nearly every day. I know she would call you daily or several times a week to talk to you. She would want to know how your day was, what you were learning in school, what you were up to, how your sports were going, if you were reading any books or had seen any movies.
I have no doubt that if she didn’t live close by, she would visit every few months. She would be here for your birthdays, school concerts, sporting events, graduations, and just because. She would want to take you out for ice cream for dinner because that’s what a grandma is supposed to do—and probably to the movies too.
You would always see her dressed in black, her favorite color, and you’d call her by the nickname your aunt and older cousins had for her: grandma with the red hair (her other favorite color was red, and yes, she was a natural brunette).
I think Grandma would send Dad and me out on a date so she could have you three all to herself. She would put on the Beach Boys or Franki Valli and have a dance party with you in the kitchen while you waited for her teddy bear brownies with cream cheese filling or some other dessert to finish baking. After all the baking, tasting, singing, and dancing, you would snuggle up with her on the couch to watch Disney movies. After she sent you to bed, you could catch her watching re-runs of Murder She Wrote while working on her latest needlepoint.
She would also be a grandma who worried constantly. I know this for certain because she was a mom who worried constantly. It’s a good thing she wasn’t raising three boys. Maybe she would have learned to worry less, maybe not. She worried enough over her two girls. I’m sure your wrestling, tree climbing, obstacle building, ninja fighting, and wall climbing would have made her a nervous wreck as she worried about someone getting hurt. There’s nothing you could do to make her stop worrying about you.
Despite her worry, she would be a grandma who loved you fiercely. She would stand up for you and defend you and insist that you are perfect because that’s what she did through the short time she was here through Christopher’s toddler years.
I want you to know a few other things about your grandma. She had some hard circumstances in her life. I think some of those things kept her from being the mom she may have wanted to be. But I think that is what made being a grandma that much more special to her. God had a plan in all of it though—the good and the bad parts of her life.
And while God made a grandma who couldn’t stay on this earth, I am left with memories to share with you of what it looks like to be a gentle, creative, generous, resilient, and imperfect person. A person who, while she was here, loved you with all her heart. She loved all her grandkids with her whole heart. And the ones she didn’t get to meet, I know they would have been so loved by her too.
We didn’t get to have her for as long as we would have liked, but I’m so thankful that God made my mom a grandma for a little while because being a grandma was, I think, the greatest joy of her life.
by Stephanie McCoy 
by Lauren Barrett 
