During Sarah’s speech, she thanked my grandmother for mentoring her over the past five years, for pushing her to go beyond her comfort zone. The audience applauded when Sarah pointed out my grandmother standing beside me, and when she stepped forward to acknowledge their applause with a smile and a wave, she looked beautiful and wise. I felt a keen sense of pride to be related to her—to Joan West. She was my grandmother, yes, but she was more than that, and it seemed inadequate to call her by a name that said nothing about her accomplishments.

From that night on, she was Joan to me. When my dad told me I was disrespecting her, my grandmother laughed and said, “We’re on a first-name basis now.”

—

Barely a couple of weeks after my dad and I returned to Massachusetts, Grandpa was diagnosed with fourth-stage pancreatic cancer. It all went so fast.

In mid-August, we flew back to California. Dad took a leave of absence from Wellesley College, where he taught. Aunt Tammy and her family came up from Pasadena, and we all stayed in a vacation rental near Woodacre. A hospital bed was set up in my grandparents’ bedroom and Grandpa spent more and more time there, while nurses came and went twice a day.

Dad and Aunt Tammy kept scurrying back and forth—from the kitchen to the bedroom to the grocery store and back—as if they were trying their hardest to hold the world together with their bare hands. Joan sat at Grandpa’s bedside and read to him, everything from the latest astronomy papers to his battered old Robert Heinlein science fiction novels. Sometimes I sat with them, and Joan’s voice would lull me into a half-waking dream of rocket ships and the boys who flew them.

Grandpa died in September. It was one of those perfect, golden days in Northern California, the air warm and weightless, the light like slowly melting butterscotch. Dad had made plans to grill steak for dinner because Grandpa said he wanted some, even though he wasn’t eating much anymore. He never ate it.

The memorial took place at the Unitarian church in Berkeley that my grandparents had gone to in the two decades they lived there. It was full of Grandpa’s former colleagues from Berkeley’s astronomy department, where he’d been a professor, but plenty of Joan’s friends came, too. Afterward, when I was waiting in the church vestibule for my parents, I saw Sarah Franco, the artist from the garage show. She was dressed all in black, with a black button-down shirt and polished black oxfords. She came over to me and told me she was sorry for my loss, and I realized then that she’d always known I was Joan’s granddaughter.

2013

Chapter 2