Nana fought against going to a hospital because she believed that if she ever went in, she would never come out. She was right. Because grandfather had an Illinois Central pension, nana went to the IC hospital in Hyde Park and there, on January 16th, she died. And, like grandfather, she was waked at the Donnellan funeral home and buried beside him in the Chapel Hill Gardens Cemetery.

I can still remember grandmother leaning against the dresser in her room and crying. I asked her why she cried and she said because she was afraid to die. I must have been ten years old. Through the years she would always tell me to make sure to visit her grave and leave her a "posy." It was a promise made before the currents of life pulled me away from Chicago and to first the West Coast and then the East.

I am too far away to bring her the posies that she wanted and so I bring them here, to a place she never could have imagined, but a place she would have loved.

Grandmother was very grateful to live in the modern days of TV dinners. When she died, we found the bottom drawer of the refrigerator filled with empty TV dinner pans. That I could understand, being a packrat, because they might come in handy someday. What I never understood was why we found all the lids as well.

The family was very grateful that she loved TV dinners. Grandmother was a really bad cook. I remember a cake she cooked from scratch that she lifted from the pan and bent back and forth. If it had been round, it would have bounced. The one good receipe she had was for bread pudding. I never thought to ask her for that receipe because she was always the one who made it. One of her sisters wrote it down for me at grandmother's funeral. I am so very grateful.

Grandmother was a fighter. She believed that you dug in and did whatever it was necessary to do. Excuses could make you more virtuous while you did whatever it was, but excuses weren't what you used to avoid it. I never doubted for an instant that she loved me with all that strength and all that energy. I loved her, too.

Nana had been a nurse and she was always the one they called when someone hurt themselves or there was an illness on the block. She was the one who organized people to collect money for children when the Polio epidemic hit. She was the one to call City Hall when there was a neighborhood problem. Grandmother wouldn't have known how to step back from someone who needed help.