Before my son was born, my mom told me she wasn’t sure what kind of grandmother she’d be. She’d already gone over and beyond as a mother, poured absolutely everything she had into raising us, and I think she assumed being a grandmother would be more of the same, a similar dynamic, maybe with a little more distance built in. She was almost bracing herself, like she’d already spent her big love and wasn’t sure how much was left. And then he arrived, her first grandchild, and all of that went right out the window. Because she fell, completely and immediately, in a way I don’t think she saw coming.

She did not want to be apart from him. I found this out for certain the first time I left him with her for a whole weekend. He was about a year old. Her house was always open, the door unlocked, come in whenever. So I went to pick him up, walked up to the door the way I always did, and it was locked. Locked. I rang the bell, and my mother’s voice came through the door, joking, telling me she’d decided to keep him a little longer and I should come back later. That was the moment I understood exactly what had happened to her. The woman who wasn’t sure how much grandmother-love she had in her was now standing behind a locked door refusing to hand over my baby. She was gone for him. Absolutely gone. And she stayed that way.

She insisted, always, that he be called Christopher. Not Chris. Christopher. If anyone shortened it in front of her, she’d correct them on the spot, gently but firmly, like the full name was part of respecting who he was. He was Christopher to her, all of him, every syllable, and she wasn’t going to let the world abbreviate him.

She took him everywhere. The beach, the zoo, amusement parks, regular little neighborhood parks, aquariums, swimming, the whole world. She helped him learn to ride a bike. There is a video somewhere of her trying to teach him how to have a cake fight, which tells you everything you need to know about the kind of grandmother she was. Not the sit-quietly-in-a-chair kind. The get-frosting-everywhere, take-him-on-every-adventure, love-him-out-loud kind. She gave that boy an absolute ocean of love, and he adored her right back. They were connected in a way you could see from across a room. He was hers and she was his, plainly, from the very start.

She died ten days before he turned seven. He was so young. I don’t know how much he remembers of her now, all these years later, and I can feel that he still carries the loss somewhere even though he doesn’t talk about it. That was one of the hardest parts for me when she died, knowing what he’d had and what he’d lost, knowing that a bond like that got cut short before he was even old enough to hold onto all of it.

The thing that comforts me most. She’s not actually gone from him. She got into him. He has her spirit, that same aliveness she had. He has her cooking ability, which is not a small inheritance, because she could cook. He has her sense of humor. He feels things deeply, the way she did. And he has this instinct for fairness that seems to live in him without anyone having to teach it, which was hers too. Every time I watch him do one of those things, I’m watching her, still here, still running through him. She poured almost seven years of pure love into that boy and it didn’t disappear when she did. It became part of who he is.

The part that undoes me is that she can’t see him now. She would be so crazy about the man he’s become. So proud, so damn proud, bragging to anyone who’d listen, probably still trying to keep him a little longer, come back later, I’m not done with him yet. She helped make him who he is, and she doesn’t get to see how he turned out. That’s the piece I can’t make peace with, the plain unfairness of it. He carries her everywhere he goes, in his humor and his cooking and his good heart, and she never got to see the whole beautiful result of all that love she couldn’t help but pour into her first grandchild.

I like to think she knows anyway, somehow. That wherever she is, she’s still crazy about him, still proud, still behind some locked door somewhere telling the universe she’s keeping him a while longer and it can come back later.