For a long time there was a portrait hung in my grandparents living room, of a beautiful woman in her wedding dress. She was always familiar, a presence that tinted my time in that house a delicate and content blue, like the dress she wore in the picture. In her portrait she has a soft smile. Her blonde hair is taken up gracefully, and her lips are painted a rich red. She is sitting straight, tall, and proud. A round chin and high Polish cheek bones. Blue eyes that see through you. And always that smile, the smile that knew everything.

I imagine who she must’ve been then, the woman in the portrait. Who she must’ve thought she was. She was born in the United States of two Polish immigrants who’d escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto. She had a brother and a sister. She spoke a bit of Polska, and cooked a mean golabki, even then. It was 1947, she was nineteen. Four decades later I would be her fifth grandchild.

When I was born she was sixty. By the time I was six she was my idol, kinder than my father, prettier than my mother. Before I turned ten, she became a goddess, the most beautiful woman in the world. She was the woman who showed me how to love, by spending precious days teaching me how to mail letters and choose meat and cut flowers. I never knew she was old. I never knew she was dying. My mother, the third daughter of five, and the only one to be named after her mother, thought grandma was a good influence on my tomboy tendencies. And I was never prouder then the day my father started calling me ‘Mary Miller’s Granddaughter.’

It wasn’t until I turned thirteen that I even knew what the word cancer meant. By then my grandmother had been battling the disease for almost a year. Lung cancer. She wore purple velvet caps on her now bald head and painted her nails red in defiance. She put on her face everyday, and drew in her eyebrows. She refused a wheelchair. She drove herself to her chemotherapy appointments. And I went with her.

She never had a problem with putting in the movie that I wanted to watch while she had toxic liquid forced into her veins. And she never showed any sign of pain or weakness. Her eyes would flutter and she and I would name the angels hanging from the ceiling of the clinic. And when she got up, I was her walker, flesh and bone. She refused the metal and plastic, and leaned on me. At thirteen years old I walked her to the car, helped her in the seat, turned the key, and guided the wheel if she needed me. If we got into the house without the help she would lie down tired on her bed and refuse to eat. I would watch cartoons and listen. A few minutes later she would throw up. Aftereffects.

Over the next three years she fought. It’s what she was always good at. She had already fought for her children, all seven of them, and the three that miscarried. She fought to save her marriage when my grandfather’s job took him to every country in the globe except home. She fought her alcoholism and won for thirty years. She fought. She didn’t give up, or give in. She smiled and fought, and in the end she let go, because she knew it hurt to watch her suffer.

At her last Christmas she was too weak to sit up with us for long. She didn’t put together the grandchildren’s red Christmas bags. My grandfather wrote a check instead. She was pale against her purple velvet, and tired, and she knew. The doctors had told her weeks before that the fight was over. So she put on her jingle bell necklace and had a glass of wine, and sat in the chair of the head of the household, smiling quietly. She struggled through seven more months. She was so strong and so alive that she was never broken. Weakness, sickness, pain, never broke through. Not even death could break her.

The last time I spoke to her I was running after my younger cousins, doing what she had always asked me to do at our gatherings, watching the little ones. I gave her a kiss and said love you Grandma. And when she looked at me she didn’t know me.

My grandmother died on August 15th on the feast of the Ascension of Mary. She opened her eyes slowly, smiled at my grandfather and looked at all of us, thirty or more in her little room, and sighed her last breath, gently smiling. I think I was the only person in the room who didn’t cry.

Now her portrait hangs in our dining room. Underneath it is a white holy candle which my mother lights two days of the year : Christmas Eve and one day in mid-August, when the air is heavy and the sun sets late. In that time of twilight, when the trees are still and you can hear the heartbeat of the world, I can feel her. The summer humidity, her callused hands in mine. The night air, her perfume. The murmur of my neighbors, and her voice telling me that I am a queen, and should never carry myself any other way. My mother talks to the candle inside the house and I linger outside, waiting for night to fall. By the time it does, my mother has fallen asleep on the couch. I walk inside and the candle is the only thing lighting the evening still room, flickering, to light just my grandmother’s softly smiling mouth, a double curve identical to my own.

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