Born to a family of doctors in Southern California, it was expected my grandfather would follow suit and take over his father’s paediatric medicine practice. He had other ideas, though. He didn’t want to be a doctor. His passions were fly-fishing and drawing. He wanted work that gave room for his creativity. He wanted to drink fully from the cup of life. He also liked to drink fully from bottles of whiskey. The happiest middle ground between his father’s wishes and his own was a career in architecture. And, for what it’s worth, my grandpa was a skilled architect. He was ahead of his time, using computer aided design to create low-cost, pre-fabricated modular homes in the early 1970s. It was a brilliant idea, well-executed to solve the problems of mass-produced, identical, cookie-cutter homes—no one bought it. By the time he had children of his own my grandpa had found the guiding light of 12-step sobriety and become a big presence in his local AA chapter. He made a meagre living designing custom homes for families, like the house I grew up in: a big, shingled, craftsman style home on the top of a hill in the high desert of Central Oregon. The home was intricate. It had complex gables in the roof. I remember lying in bed as a teenager trying to count every surface of the ceiling in my room. I wish I had a picture of that ceiling. There were at least 8 planes intersecting to complete the complicated gable. Throughout all of his architectural designs his highest priority was light. He believed every home should be full of sunlight. I get this sense that his pursuit of light was part of his desire to live fully. This big, vibrant man—born and raised on California beaches, a passionate dancer—knew sunlight was medicine, capable of bouying us through the trials of life. My grandpa knew strife, he knew rock bottom, and understood light was a medicine that made demons run and hide. He wanted his family, his grandchildren, to live in a bright home, to be protected from exposure to too much darkness. For a full year he brought a scale model of our home to its empty lot, testing different positions and angles to make sure it captured the most light possible throughout the entire year. Before the home was finished, before he met his granddaughter or saw sunlight bounce around his carefully crafted gables, my grandfather returned to darkness. Even in the way he died, my grandpa embodied the contrast between light and dark. It was at a sober party for new AA members. Despite his lack of training or skill, I hear that my grandfather was more passionate than anyone one the dance floor. He’d flail and wiggle until the sweat flew off of his large, Norwegian body. I imagine him in a dimly lit room, lights flashing, at the center of a circle of friends. He’s in the spotlight, eyes closed in bliss, jumping and jiving more than anyone. And then bam: lights out. As my mom tells the story, he was dead before his body hit the ground. My grandfather danced so hard his heart exploded. I was only a few months old. He’d held my helpless little body once. By no means was I ready for my grandpa Dan to die. I wish I knew him. I wish he’d been around to teach me to draw and hunt, to drive me in his run-down sports cars out to Yellowstone to watch the bison. These are all greifs I bear. We’re never ready for it when death comes knocking. We’re left scrambling to make sense of the scraps of life left behind. My grandfather’s deep passion for life meant that he lived close to the bone and died pennyless. His biggest legacy to my family was the home he designed. A physical manifestation of his vibrant life. It was a bright, safe home on a sunny, generous plot. I feel very lucky to have grown up there. Above the garage he’d planned a large studio apartment, thinking my parents could rent it out to subsidize their mortgage. After his death, though, my grandma—his ex-wife—decided to move in. She lived with us for nearly 2 decades, filling almost every gap my parents left in raising us. When they had to work late she’d make us dinner; when they were away we’d all have a slumber party up stairs at grandma’s. After school we’d rip off our shoes and race up the stairs—counting each one out loud—to see who could get there first. She’d make us a snack and plop us down in front of the TV to watch Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers. We called her “grandma,” and she played her role masterfully. If my grandpa died fast and all of a sudden, my grandma took her sweet time on her way to the grave. It was like a tired, weak attempt to wring every last drop out of life. My memory of her from my childhood is so different than how she was in her final days. That apartment above the garage was so full of life. If she wasn’t knitting she’d be out in the garden, sowing 2-meter wide lavender plants, wild sage, and perennial flower beds that made all the neighbors jealous. When I got home from school I’d rip off my shoes and race up the stairs to see her. I always counted those steps, but never got the same answer. If I counted the number of flat surfaces my feet landed on there were 15 steps. If I counted the number of times I lifted my leg there were 16. If I skipped steps I’d count in twos, making it all more complicated. I could never decide which was the best way to count it. Were there 15 or 16? At the heart of the matter was the problem of what made a step a step. Was a step defined in terms of a distance from the ground floor, where the ground floor is zero and the first stair one? Or was a step counted as the distance between ground floor and stair, a distance defined by the movement of my leg? So the distance between ground floor and the first stair is one, the next distance two, and so on? I imagine these are the types of questions my grandpa could’ve resolved. I’ve never answerd it and I still don’t know how to count steps. But counting the steps up to grandma’s took my mind off of a deep fear I had. _What if grandma wasn’t home?_ It was far easier my little mind to deal with the meaningless uncertaintny of not knowing how to count steps than it was to linger on the idea that grandma might be not be home. Fortunately, she usually was home. She was the bedrock of a stable childhoood. Not long after we got back from Italy, when I was 13, life became less stable. I don’t have many memories from this time. It wasn’t really a suprise when my parents told us they’d be divorcing. But I pretended to be shocked and outraged in attempt to protest it. If my mom and dad split up, would grandma move out? That was the beginning of the end of my childhood. When my dad moved out we split time between his house and my moms. We saw grandma less, too. She’d still be there after school but it was different. It wasn’t long before she decided to move out. I wish I could ask her what that time was like from her perspective. What what is like to watch your daughter and son-in-law separate? To know that you’d be seeing less of your grandkids, who were such a big part of your life? I want to relive that moment with her. I was so distrated, so self-absorbed at the time that I never asked her what that was like for her. I don’t feel that I did enough to celebrate with her our speical years together growing up. When I was 10 my mom took me to Italy. We visited a great deal of ancient buildings with many, many stairs. They came from a time before elevators. I counted every step in all those buildings. Tens of thousands of steps, and I counted every single one. The counting took my mind off where we going or how far we hard to go get there. In a foreign land, in places I barely understood (I was only 10, after all) counting steps gave me a certainty. It confirmed the grandeur of the ancient sites we were visiting. I could quantify the the burning in my legs and validate my sense of wonder: yes, this building is very tall. When my grandma did finally move out of the house it was to an apartment building. There wasn’t anywhere to garden—or so we all thought until she dug up the lazy landscaping in front of the building and replaced it with her own arrangement of flowering perennials. The management was angry at first, but they couldn’t justify ripping it up. When she couldn’t get on her hands and knees to weed and tend her rebellious plot she became a hoarder of houseplants. You coudnl’t really move very well without fear of tipping over one of her pots. Her cat was always getting into them, wreaking havoc. When her watering can became too heavy, she scaled down again. One at a time she gave away her houseplants and replaced them with smaller and easier succulents. She had a half-dozen on the windowsill by her bed. He cat would still knock them over. At first she’d carefully clean up the soil and repot each hearty little guy. Later, she’d just throw them away and get knew ones. By her late 70s she began having balance issues. Once she fell headfirst into a curb, giving herself two black eyes and a mighty concussion. Looking back, this moment stands out as the first dominoe in a years-long chain of devastation after devastation. Moving forward in time from that moment the significant changes my grandma experienced stack up like like layers of sediment turning into stone. The signs are almost glaringly obvious now. On our last trip to the beach she spent most of her time sitting at the dinner table in our AirBNB looking at her computer. Every 10 minutes she’d announce some infuriating headline, “Donald Trump this, Donald Trump that,” totally detached from the rest of the room. Driving home from that beach trip she looked out over the single-family homes in front of her apartment building—the neighbourhood she’d watched grow for the past 10 years—and remarked, “Gosh, when did this new development go in?” The sharp, bright woman I’d known had become something else. A stranger had moved into my grandma’s mind. This was all just a few weeks before everything shut down due to the global COVID pandemic. My partner, Aidan, and I moved back to Canada where we live. In our own efforts to cope with the evolving status of stay-at-home orders and mask mandates we moved up north to a town called Masset, on the furtherst tip of Haida Gwaii, several days journey back to Bend. From an agonizing distance I watched as grandma’s health declined in increasingly large steps. She started falling more. Once she broke her wrist. In the hospital, as they put on her cast, she got up and slipped again, breaking her hip as the nurse scrambled to catch her. These steps were too subtle to count. They were so much more complicated the steps I’d climb to go see her. There was no consolation. The doctors recommended surgery for her hip. I started to see that things weren’t going to get better for grandma. I risked viral exposure, flying home home to be with her. The hip surgery was wildly successful, according to the osteopathic surgeon. For my grandma, though, the event was tramatic. She paid a tax on the anesthesia, a tax called ______ dimentia. When I finally walked into the hospital room to greet her she looked up at me, smiled, and said, “Oh Dan, it’s so good to see you.” Dan was my grandma’s name and the name of her youngest child and only son, my uncle. It wasn’t long after that she was put in hospice care. The last great moment we had together was this one: Although she didn’t know our names, she could name every flowering bud as my siblings and I wheeled her through that sunny spring air. It took a lot longer, by my entire family was no more prepared for my grandmother’s death than we had been for my grandfather’s. In a way, the slow pace of it was even more confusing. It was more chaotic—the ambulance rides, the fight to get her out of the hospital and into someplace more hospitable; the cane turning into the walker turning into the wheelchair—it was hard to keep up with the changes, hard to register what it all meant. The steps were uncountable. I remember wheeling her body into the mini-van that came to pick up. It was so sad to know she was no longer with us, to feel this unfill-able void open in the world. That weight of not knowing if grandma was home that I worked so hard to run from as a kid had finally landed, There was no doubt now: grandma would never be home again, not in my home at least. But, in a way, she was finally and at last, home. She wouldn’t be confused any more. She wouldn’t have to learn ever again that her mother was dead, her friends were dead, her ex-husband was dead. She was, finally and at longlast, in peace. What are we left with when our loved ones die? An empty feeling, a pile of coat hangers from Walmart. Like my grandpa, my grandma died destitute. The penance she’d saved after 60 years at work was barely enough to settle her dues. She left hardly anything behind—no home, no furniture, not even a garden. It’d all been sold, given away, or downsized as she moved from home to apartment to hospice. A few short days after her cremation, still early in 2021, I flew back home to Masset, to my little life with my little cat and my loving partner, Aidan. I went to work, walked, did what I could to carry on. But that empty void remained inside, while chaos only seemed to grow around me. Protests against racial violence erupted across the United States, COVID ravaged communities in India, and more. Vaccines came like a breath of fresh air, but with it came the sour taste of science denial and wide-spread division. At the same time as these larger-scale events broke our hearts and confused us, our own little lives developed their own mayhem. We were out on the edge of the world, alone and broken hearted. I became a bit depressed, lurking through the house like an automaton, going through the motions but not really feeling much of anything. One day Aidan brought home a succulent from the grocery story. 2-inches tall, she thought I could look after it, like my grandma did. The gesture was touching and the little plant brought some joy in my life. But the chaos became more intense as it became more local. After my grandma passed, my brother chased his own demons across the US. My younger sibling walked to school through stale mustard gas and the refuse of police violence. Protests erupted across the US. In Canada, the opioid epidemic and the COVID pandemic warred to see how could stack up more bodies. Meanwhile, homes on the humble street of Aidan’s childhood sold for millions, reminding me of my own reasons for leaving my home town. I just couldn’t see myself there anymore. It seemed like everything was fraying at the seams. We decided to move across the province to Golden. It was a big move, several thousand kilometers across the sea and the rocky mountians. We had some friends living their and figured the community and sunshine might give us a respite from . We packed all our worldly possessions and our cat into our van and did our best to keep our chins up as we left the first home we’d ever made together. Along the way our van broke down. We adopted a puppy. The four of us lived in campsites. In August we went to Cumberland to visit Aidan’s family. It was a sorely needed injection of love and support. By mid-September the four of us were still living in Aidan’s dad’s yard. We decided to stay, and were lucky to land, flustered and unstable, in a basement apartment on Camp Road. After some time we realized we’d be staying, and drove back to Golden to pick up the rest of our belongs from a storage unit by the highway. After one more vehicle breakdown we finally arrived back our friend’s place. We opened up our second vehicle we’d left there two months earlier. Sitting there on the dashboard, blackened and shrivelled, was the succulent Aidan had given me. It was nearly weightless, having been drying in the desert sun for two months. With a bit of shame and guilt I brought it to the trash can. I was about to throw it out when I felt my grandma’s wisdom rise up in me. Succulents are hardy things. Without much hope, I kept it. Back in Cumberland I rediscovered it for the second time as we unloaded our things. I watered it just like my grandma had taught me. You have to put the tap on the slowest possible trickle and soak the plant for several minutes. I gave that succulent a long drink. I woke the next day to find five new buds on the tip of it. The plant exploded for the next week. This was her legacy. A voice from beyond, screaming, “Life is abundant. Life is pure.” Traditional cultures have elaborate rituals to honour and call upon their ancestors in times of need. I didn’t have a ritual, but there my grandma was, directing my hand, showing me the way. Modern western culture has no such ritual of guidance. Instead we try to give our loved ones a chance to express their dying wishes. We call it their legacy. It’s passed down in a short document, the last expression of their will to create—the house goes to Charlie, the business goes to Doug. “This is how I want it to be after I’m gone,” it says. After my grandma passed, right after her funeral, her children and grand children gathered in a storage locker to go through everything that remained. Buried beneath 24 matching pairs of Merrit slip-on sneakers, a pile of miscellany from Walmart, and a three-pack of Costco Advil, unopened and expired, we found one gold necklace. Even though we saw her death coming from a mile away, we found ourselves asking, “Is this really what she would’ve wanted?” Are these the scraps we’re left to scramble through? I find myself jumping to the takeaway: death _can’t_ make sense. Sense is something we make with our heads, our intellects. Meaning we make with our heart. What death means to each of us is unique. In our culture death means the end; it means legacy and will. Each of us is left alone to make our own meaning out of the death we experience in our lives. That’s not right. It helps to have people who agree on the meaning of death. If we don’t make meaning out of it, all we’re left with is the emptiness. There’s also no meaning in life. A succulent growing on a windowsill is, by itself, meaningless. It’s just biology. It’s what happens when sun, air, and water meet on this planet. But to me, the story I tell myself about it is everything. The way I make it mean something changes the event.