7 minute read
My daughter’s great-grandmother passed away recently at 97, and Nan was a prolific diarist for the majority of her life. Every journal she’d ever used to document her life was neatly lined up on a shelf in the living room. Nan had no fear. And it was impossible to embarrass her. All of the young relatives were encouraged to pick a volume, page through and find something to ask questions about, some event or occurrence in her life. That was how her grand- and great-grand kids found out that she was married at 14 to a 26 year old. “It was a different time” she’d say, waving her hand through the air toward all of the evidence sitting there looking at her. She even covered how she felt when she saw indoor plumbing for the first time. We know how she felt, watching her husband go off to war, then her sons a generation later. We know how Nan coped with the death of her own mother. We know how she felt on the day the Challenger exploded and how she felt on the day when men walked on the moon for the first time. Nan wrote about her feelings
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