Our grandfather was a handsome man: sad, bighearted, modern.

For Grandma’s ninetieth birthday, her children and oldest grandchildren organized a mass in her living room. She couldn’t talk anymore; she used to be sturdy, almost as big as my mother, and now she was shrunken, but she was still present, you could see it in her eyes. Still proud, above everyone, yet somehow modest. During the personal reflections, after the officiant’s sermon— a Neocatechumenal custom—my relatives declared that even in her tribulations, Grandma was strong “and wrestled with God.”

They tried to put a good spin on something that had never really been explained: how was it that Grandma’s faith had been so strong and yet so unruly at the same time? No one could ever presume to be more devout than she was, but if her children went out of their way to stress their own confirmation, she’d never been impressed by her faith. To me, an impassioned twenty-year-old who wanted to reconcile snobbery and the spirit, elegance and spiritual exercises, she said with a serene disquiet all her own: “You’re a poet, you’ll never get along with Catholics. You’re too sensitive.” “Come on, I’m not that sensitive,” I protested, “I’m completely normal.” “You’ll see. You’ll see.”

Her four Neocatechumenal children tried to make sense of a story that was hard to make sense of, a story, however, that they found splendid: the story of a woman of the Old Testament, of violent faith.

While my mother, trying not to cry, said that now that Grandma had grown smaller, more delicate, she smelled like Mommy again, the smell she went searching for in her parents’ closet, breathing in, nostrils wide, when she was a little girl and her mother was away.

Back to the poet. After my grandma refused him, he decided to take his own life. Grandma told Irene that a friend of the poet’s family, “an important philosopher,” told the boy if he no longer valued his own life, he might as well enlist and donate it to the country, since they were at war. The poet died “carrying the flag in an assault” (we’ll never know if this is true—it feels like a World War I anecdote, and my grandma was born in 1922, which makes me think the story she told Irene happened to a friend of her father’s that she conflated with her own story of failed love).