Lewis says:

I watch my mom as she rests in the recliner we moved to the porch just this morning. 17 year old Thad, down by the gate to the woods, turns to look back at us. He lifts his hand to his Nana, so much like Grandad that it amazes even me.

Thad opens the gate, hesitates, his head snaps back, he turns to the woods, I look at Mom. She’s raised her hand the slightest bit off the arm of the chair, she’s smiling. I still hear her voice, “We never had much stuff, but we always had each other!”

Leigh Kimmel says:

The most painful sacrifice I made for the restoration of the Republic wasn’t actually my academic career, even if it was the one that hurt most when I first arrived at Sparta Point. But as the weeks turned into months and then years, what really cut deep was the separation from my family.

I only learned about Grandma Fox’s death about two months after the fact, and that by complete accident. We were doing some undercover work, trying to stop a plot to discredit one of our people in the Nevada state government. I was at a library, trying to look like a regular patron while I was monitoring activity at a particular storefront.

I was leafing through a bound volume of back issues of a local weekly newspaper when an article caught my eye. I don’t remember the exact title, something along the lines of “Local Figure Remembered,” but more elegantly phrased. My first thought was it can’t be the same person, that “Esther Fox” isn’t that uncommon a name.

But as soon as I started reading, I knew it was her, even before I got to the part about children and grandchildren. At least they didn’t name all of us grandchildren, just listed numbers of sons and daughters to each of Grandma’s children. That’s how I discovered that Aunt Jessie had had two more children since I’d last been in touch.

Which was when I realized our son would never know his great-grandmother — and she’d died never even knowing that she was one.