The morning of the flight, Grandma stood beside her worn green suitcase with both hands wrapped tightly around the handle, dressed carefully in her travel clothes, wearing the pearl earrings, her white hair set the way she always set it for occasions that mattered to her. I picked her up myself that morning
to drive her to the airport where we’d meet the rest of the family, and I remember thinking, watching her check her passport for the third time in the car, that I hadn’t seen her this excited about anything in years.
We met my parents, Aunt Monica, and my two cousins at the check-in counter. Everyone seemed a little rushed, a little too focused on their own bags, their own boarding passes, not quite making eye contact with Grandma the way you’d expect a family this excited about a shared trip to behave. I noticed it and dismissed it, the way you dismiss a hundred small oddities every day because examining each one would leave you no time to actually live your life.
