Final truth: Love is not keeping each other dry. Love is standing in the rain together and not running away. If this article resonated with you, share it with someone who still has a grandmother. And then go call her. Even if it’s raining.
Years later, I would learn that her older brother had drowned when she was six. No one had told me. No one in the family spoke of it. The drowning happened in a creek behind their house—three feet deep, but he’d hit his head on a rock. Water took him. And my grandmother, at six years old, had watched.
Not bathing—she was fastidious about that. But bodies of water. Lakes. Rivers. Swimming pools. The ocean, which she had never seen in person but spoke of as if it were a personal enemy. “The sea wants to take things,” she’d say, wiping her hands on her apron. “And it doesn’t give them back.” My Grandmother -Grandma- you-re wet- -Final- By...
And I thought: I should have held her longer. I should have told her that water isn’t the enemy. That the creek didn’t take her brother—the rock did, the bad luck, the cruel arithmetic of childhood accidents. Water is just water. It holds us, or it doesn’t. But it doesn’t hate us.
No. That’s not right. I was holding the hose. She was wet. Final truth: Love is not keeping each other dry
I knelt beside her and took her hand. It was cold and papery, like a leaf pressed too long in a book.
Kneel down. Hold their face. And say the small, impossible, holy thing. And then go call her
Then she walked inside, changed her clothes, and didn’t speak to me for four hours. When she finally emerged, she acted as if nothing had happened. But something had happened. A crack had opened in the floor of our understanding. I had seen her afraid not of snakes or bad men or darkness, but of something as simple and necessary as water.