Then she reached across the table and took both my hands.
Her hands were thin and trembling.
But her grip was surprisingly strong.
“Sweetheart,” she said, “you’ve worked too hard to let grief take this away from you.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t care about a diploma.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No.”
She smiled sadly.
“You care about what your parents would have wanted.”
That broke me.
I started crying.
She pulled me toward her.
Then she whispered:
“Just get your diploma. One last day. Do it for me.”
So I promised her I would.
## What I Didn’t Know
What I didn’t know was that my grandmother had already begun planning something.
For three weeks, she had been writing a letter.
Not to me.
Not to one of my teachers.
Not to a relative.
She had written it to someone I hadn’t spoken to in more than a year.
Someone from my past.
Someone I had stopped expecting to hear from.
Someone whose absence had once hurt almost as much as losing my parents.
My grandmother didn’t tell me.
She simply kept writing.
Every evening, she sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea beside her.
Sometimes she wrote for twenty minutes.
Sometimes she stared at the page for nearly an hour.
She crossed out sentences.
Started again.
Folded pages.