My Grandmother Came to Say Goodbye in a Dream

My grandmother raised me for a good part of my childhood, and even after I moved across the country for work we spoke every Sunday. She had been getting frail, but nothing sudden, nothing anyone was bracing for.

One night I had a dream that did not feel like a dream. I was in my own bedroom, the real one, and she was sitting on the edge of my bed the way she used to when I was small and could not sleep. She looked well. Better than well. She looked the way I remembered her from years before, strong and clear-eyed, and she smelled like her kitchen, like bread and a particular soap, which is not a thing dreams usually do.

She took my hand and told me she was proud of me. She said it plainly, the way she never quite managed to on the phone. She told me to look after my mother. And then she said, very gently, that she had to go now, and that I was not to be sad, because she had had a good long time of it and she was tired and ready. She squeezed my hand. I remember the exact pressure of it.

I woke at dawn with the feeling of her hand still in mine. A few minutes later my phone rang. It was my mother, crying. My grandmother had passed in the night, peacefully, in her sleep. When my mother told me the time, adjusting for the two hours between us, it was, as near as anyone could tell, the same time she had been sitting on the edge of my bed.

I have grieved her since, of course. But I have never once felt cheated of a goodbye, because she gave me one, and I felt her hand, and I will believe until the day I die that she made the trip.