This past month, I have been trying to follow fellow blogger Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s
adviceon how to eliminate summer regret by breaking up my writing goals into small tasks and plotting them onto a calendar of available days. I scheduled weekly dates with my writing “coach”/colleague. I made progress by forcing myself to write drafts even before I felt quite ready, instead of circling around and around a project. Perhaps, I thought happily, by summer’s end I would have made substantial progress on my book, prepared for my new administrative duties, and organized my courses! I was on a roll.
And then my Grandmother died. She was 98, so her death was an event we’d been expecting for so long that we’d started to believe it would never happen. Death disrupts our schedules, our plans, or lives. And so it should.
My grandmother was the matriarch of our family and an important figure in my life, but our relationship was also fraught with criticism, disappointment, and occasionally anger. She criticized me more than any other person in my family. My hippy upbringing upset her notions of proper decorum, and I often thought her life as a wife and mother limited. But her attitude changed markedly when I began achieving in school. When I graduated from college with honors, she surprised me by breaking into tears. Later, she helped support me through graduate school, and she became the first person to whom I sent news of my awards,
