The subject line of the email from Kathy was Did you see this yet? The post contained a link to a story entitled, “Mother of Children Slain in Nanny Case is Pregnant.” I clicked on the link at the next stoplight.

“We are very happy to let you know that Marina is expecting a baby in the fall,” the couple wrote on the Lulu & Leo’s Fund Facebook page. “Nessie can’t wait to welcome her new baby brother. We are filled with many emotions as we look to the future, but the most important one is hope.”

Lulu and Leo had died less than seven months earlier. Big stupid tears of happiness burst forth as the light turned green. Parents of murdered babies still loving the world enough to bring a new life into existence was a radical and powerful act of hope. My disillusionment of the past week vanquished in an instant.

And yet, even as my disillusionment faded, even as the Krims were creating new life, my Gram was dying.

“It’s not good,” my dad said. My parents had driven from Chicago to Minneapolis to be with her. It had only been a week, a very long week, since Jon and I watched Gram relish the berries. Her indomitable spirit had been as strong as ever, but physically, she seemed weak and unnaturally insubstantial.

“It’s like when I stand up, there’s nothing there, there’s nothing to stand on,” she had told me.

“Does she know you’re there?” I asked my dad.

“When we first got here, she tried to get out of bed. I had to hold her down until help could arrive,” he said.

“Never out of the fight. Never. That sounds like her. She wouldn’t want you to see her in bed.”

“The hospice nurse thinks she’s trying to make it to her birthday,” which was less than ten days away, “but thinks she probably won’t make it. It’s not good…I mean…” he struggled then said. “Look, she’s dying.”

I knew it, and I knew it was time, but I was nowhere near ready. “So she knows you’re there?” I asked again.

“Yes, but she’s barely talking. She says one word and then drifts to sleep. I thinks she’s knows I’m here, but it’s not good….” Then it was quiet.

“Dad, are you there?”

“Hold on, the doctor just walked in,” he said.

“Sarah? Hi.” My mom was on the line.

“How is she? How’s Dad?”

“It’s not good, it’s sad,” she said. Her voice was soft, shaky, broken. “But she wouldn’t want you to be sad.” Then I was crying, too. “She’d want us to remember the nice things she did.”

On Sunday, when my parents left to go back to Chicago and work, Gram’s heartbeat was elevated and her blood pressure was down.

On Monday, my dad phoned again. “They’ve given her Haldol. She was uncomfortable and kept pulling out her oxygen tube. They’ve upped her morphine to make sure she’s comfortable.”

On Tuesday he reported, “Her systems are shutting down.”

I wanted to get on a plane and go to her, but I knew she wouldn’t want me there. My grandmother was the exemplar of the word proud. She wouldn’t want me to witness her dying or to remember her in bed, unresponsive, with some unnaturally grey color to her face.

She would want me to remember the times we shared in Winnetka going to the library to get books and the stationary store to get school supplies for the new schoolyear and Walgreens to get orange tic-tacs. She’d want me to remember the cross-country road trips, the dinners we had out in Minneapolis, the easy conversations we shared as I laid on the red carpet of her small house, her infectious giggle that remained to the end.

It wasn’t fair to ask her to stay. I’d already begged her once, two years before when she’d had pneumonia and was declining fast. I’d flown immediately to Minneapolis and had stayed with her in the hospital until her oxygen levels returned to normal. That day we’d made a deal: she had to wait for the babies’ birth, she had to know them. But now she had met them. And Kalvin and Grace would know who she was, I would make sure of that. And Gram knew how much I loved her. I hoped she also knew it was okay to go.

“She’s never going to get out of bed again, is she?” I asked my Dad.

“No, hon, she’s not.” The tears came again.

I sent my dad Gram’s favorite passage, Ecclesiates 3:1-8, and he asked the nurses to read it to her whenever they could. I collected all the framed pictures I had of Gram around the house and set them on the dining room table so I’d see her every time I walked by. I kept one by the side of my bed next to a ceramic tea light candleholder shaped like an open palm. I cringed every time my phone rang.

On Wednesday, my dad said, “She probably won’t make it past the weekend. The hospice nurse said she’s held on way longer than most she’s seen.”

“Of course she has,” I said.

My dad laughed. “That’s what I said, of course she has.”

My dad, never one to show his emotions, was struggling too. He’d been Gram’s eldest child, the one who at nine years old had stepped forward to help care for his family when his father died. They talked every day.

”She’s a strong woman. God, she’s so stubborn. She’s managed to survive things that would decimate most people,” I said.

“She’s certainly made the best of things.”

I lived in a state of suspension, waiting for the call. I already missed the sound of her voice when she answered the phone, Oh! Hi Sarah! I already missed her laughter, her feistiness, her stubborn will. Grief closed in, ushering me back into the dark murk of the snow globe. No, I won’t go, I told it. There were good memories, so many good memories.

On Thursday, my dad simply said, “She’s going.”

I struggled too, as if my spirit and body were fading with hers. A cold I’d been nursing developed into a sinus and then ear infection. “I’m just so tired,” I said to Dan on Friday night. He brought me dinner in bed, wheat thins and cheddar cheese, and we watched “Chelsea Lately.”

On Saturday morning, I had a missed call from my parent’s home number. 2:30 a.m. My Gram was gone. I called home.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hi honey.” It was in his voice and mine too.

“So you know.” I knew but hadn’t yet heard the words. “Gram passed away last night.”

When I was eight, I overheard a woman in a restroom talking to her companion in the next stall over, accusing me of purposefully taking her son’s Lands End jacket that looked exactly like mine. When I told Gram what I had heard, her face hardened. Without a word, she turned and walked into the bathroom. She was gone less than a minute. When I looked at her, said nothing. Shortly thereafter, the woman and her companion exited the restroom and approached us. “I am sorry, it was wrong for me to accuse you of stealing. I know you were the one who noticed the mistake and corrected it. I am sorry.” I looked up at Gram, with her perfectly permed grey-white hair, her matching earrings and necklace, her immaculate make-up, her red scarf, her heals, her fierce regal stance; she looked down at me and nodded.

When I was ten, struggling with the proverbial mean girls at school, she listened for a bit and then said to me with complete conviction, “Sarah, you know who you are. You are kind, brave, smart, strong and talented. Those girls are not and that is why they are cruel. You just keep being you. You know who you are.”

It was something she said a lot, to both my brother and me, “You know who you are, you are a Tueting, and you can do anything you set your mind to.” She believed it and she made us believe as well. For every new challenge, every adventure, her belief was always in my head because it had become my own.

But in the year before she died, she had said to me, “Sometimes, I think you do things just because you can and not because you necessarily want to.” I pictured myself following my brother down a black diamond ski slope, scared out of my mind. I pictured myself training for the 2002 Olympics. She’d understood, seen, and loved all of me. “You were given so many gifts, but I want you to do what you really want to do.”

The day after Gram died, I decided to take more pride in my clothes, to wear only those things that reflect my spirit. I decided to care less about what simply didn’t matter. I decided to send cards to my parents, brother, nieces, and nephews for holidays, as she had done for us. I decided every Christmas I’d order her popcorn tin and make divinity. I decided to relax and enjoy life more. Those things suddenly felt right, as if in her perfect peace and perfect understanding, she had reached down and touched my heart to say, It’s okay, slow down now. Just relax. Just slow down and enjoy.

“I love you Gram.” It flowed so easily.

“I know dear, I know,” she’d say. “And I love you sweetheart.”