000003 #crow I like who I come from. My grandfather was smart and made little puzzles out of nails. He could also drive a nail in with one swing of a hammer. My grandmother was sturdy and generous and humble. My other grandfather was an ornery son of a bitch who found pens on the street instead of buying them. He was in WWII. He was a machinist and later a civil servant. I have a bunch of his clothes that he never wore. My other grandmother is sweet, sarcastic, outgoing, kind. She says she'll go when God tells her it's time. She won't make that decision herself, she says. I don't know why I'm talking about this, she says. Shame on me. There's no shame, I tell her. We're drinking coffee. All three of her daughters are here, plus one of their husbands, and me and my wife and my almost-one-year-old daughter. My grandmother's great-granddaughter. Who screams just then, and then laughs, pumps her legs and claps her hands and everybody loves it. I love it. And I'm always so afraid of people whose best loved ones have just died. I'm always so afraid they'll be aliens now, by pain transformed into something I don't know and that doesn't know me, so that if I try to say something it'll come out wrong, be something hurtful to them because we're aliens to each other now. But you know what? We're not. We're anything but. It's easy. You bring your wife and daughter. Or whoever you've got. You come. You have some coffee. Maybe a brownie or a cookie. Your daughter can make a mess of crumbs on the floor. You can take some of your grandfather's old clothes. They fit. I'll use these, you can say, and you can mean it. Thank god. It's still okay. You're not an alien after all.