My grandmother had a lot of grandchildren, and so she had to be judicious in her gifts. Nevertheless, when I was a kid, I was delighted to be given the miniature pink glass vase and matching pitcher that I used to admire on the stand in her dining room.

As a child I also made it my business to note the preferences of all the important adults in my life: favorite color, favorite food, favorite animal, etc. When we got the call this morning she was gone, we were at Home Depot buying flowers for the beds and containers outside our building. As I walked back to our shopping carts filled with annuals, I noticed that by chance we had chosen mostly flowers in her favorite color: red.

She had been very ill for some time, and when the news came that she had pneumonia we all started preparing ourselves for the worst. When I tell people she lived to be 94 they seem surprised. I always have to restrain myself from retorting that I'd hoped she'd make it to 95.

Since then, I've been trying to move past the last few visits and assemble my good memories. In the end it's not a series of moments, like you'd think, but a series of actions that I remember. I remember my grandma who made peanut butter cookies, who taught me the days of the week in German, who played a mean game of euchre, who graciously forebore to eat spaghetti on Thanksgiving in 1988 when we realized we were the only two people in Ohio who didn't know how to cook. I didn't find it a funny story at the time, but she always reminded me of it later, with a laugh. She was there at every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, every Easter. Like me, there were a lot of things she refused to eat. Before the guests came she would hand me her comb and ask me to fix her hair.

She had strong ideas about how things should go. If you had doubts about where you should sit at a party or a funeral, she would tell you. She understood her place in the world through her relationships with other people. For many years she was the locus of all the news and was able to deliver a detailed account of the doings of all my relatives, and all their relatives.

Now that she's not here to tell us how to plan her funeral, we are all a bit adrift.

My last good memory is that she came to Indiana for my wedding in 1998, with "my bodyguard" as she referred to her companion. There's a lovely photo of her talking to my best friend. Grandma's looking a little serious, one finger raised, as if she's delivering a lesson on raising sons.

I've noticed that I don't have many pictures of her by herself. She's always part of a group: with her many brothers, with her husband, with her sons, later with her grandchildren or great-grandchildren. My favorite picture, though, is from one Christmas when my dad decided to give my grandmothers joke presents. Hers is something in a bottle, I'm not sure just what. In the picture, everyone is in a sea of Christmas wrapping paper, laughing. As always, she is part of a group.

But here, for once, Mary, the picture is just you.

I'll miss you.