Happy Sunday evening, friends.
How is everyone doing on this crisp and cool Sunday night? Did you have a good weekend? Shoot me a text or drop me a comment — I’d genuinely love to hear how your weekend went.
Yesterday was a day of decluttering, releasing, and letting go of things that no longer serve me. While sorting through old boxes and forgotten corners, I found a few photos tucked away — little pieces of my life I hadn’t seen in years. One of them stopped me in my tracks.
It was my Granny.
She was sitting in a booth at a restaurant, eating an ice cream cone — chocolate chip on a sugar cone, her favorite. She had the biggest smile on her face. She was happy. And for a moment, I could almost hear her laugh again.
One thing I wish I had known about my Granny is what her deepest feelings were. I know she lived a life that mirrored parts of mine, but I never really got to hear her story in her own words. Maybe it’s time to sit down with the one person who might know — Aunt Billie. Maybe she’d share some of the heartaches and the sweetest memories Granny entrusted to her. It can’t hurt to ask.
As I step deeper into this journey of living letters and legacy stories, I’m realizing what an honor it is to be trusted with the intimate details of someone’s life. I don’t take that lightly. And in some small way, every story I hear brings Granny to mind. I only saw her good days — the smiles, the softness, the strength — and I’ve often wondered what her deepest thoughts truly were.
The last memory I have of her is holding her hand while saying my final goodbye. I hugged her and told her I loved her. She squeezed my hand as tightly as her fragile fingers could and looked up at me.
“Did I do good?” she asked.
Yes, Granny. You did good.
There are moments in life that carve themselves into you so deeply that you can still feel them years later — not as pain, but as a kind of quiet knowing. The photo I cherish now is of us holding hands on what would be her last day here on earth. It’s one of those moments carved into my soul, one I will carry until we meet again.
November 10, 2021 was the last time I held her hand. The last time I whispered “I love you” into a space where she could still hear it.
I didn’t know then how much that moment would stay with me. I didn’t know how often I’d return to it — not in grief, but in gratitude.
Granny saw things about my life that I wasn’t ready to see. She saw the hurt I was carrying long before I ever admitted it out loud. She saw the way I kept choosing someone who didn’t choose me back. She saw the excuses I made, the shrinking I did, the way I tried to hold together something that was slowly breaking me.
And she never judged me for it. She just held space for me — the way only she could.
For a long time, I thought I failed her by staying too long. I thought she must have been disappointed watching me dim myself for someone who didn’t know how to love me well. I thought she must have wondered why I didn’t walk away sooner.
But maybe she understood. I’m a fighter, just like she was. Stubborn. Loyal. Hopeful. And she also knew something else: she had instilled in me a desire to find myself.
I think that was the real meaning behind her question, “Did I do good?” Of course she did good — but was I doing good? She wanted me to think. And she got me to think.
For years, I wasn’t ready to hear her words. I wasn’t ready to receive the truth she saw in me. We have to be ready to become — and back then, I wasn’t. I made choices she didn’t agree with, but that never broke the bond we had. I thought I had to choose.
But now… I know better.
She never needed me to choose her. She needed me to eventually choose myself.
And I did.
It took time. It took heartbreak. It took unlearning and relearning and rebuilding. But I became the woman she always saw in me — the one she believed I could be even when I couldn’t see it myself.
Tonight, as I think about that photo of her eating her favorite ice cream and the one of us holding hands before she fell into her final sleep, I feel her in the softest ways. Not in the ache of loss, but in the warmth of legacy. In the strength she passed down. In the becoming she always knew was coming.
That last “I love you” wasn’t the end of her love for me. It’s in every brave choice I make now. Every boundary. Every truth I speak. Every moment I choose myself.
She’d be proud of me now. And somehow… I think she always was.
Love Life++ Hugs, Dawna — may the butterflies remind you that we are all still becoming
Love Life with Dawna 