“Like anything that changes you forever, (it) split my life into halves: Before and After” ~ Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children.

I remember reading this line and thinking to myself; I can relate to this. Here I was, a twenty-year-old, reading about a fifteen-year-old whose Grandfather’s death changed his life forever, and I found myself transported back to the death that changed my life forever. After my grandmother’s death five years ago, my life became a lot like Jacob’s, there was only the before and the after.

The Before is a rush of memories, of long squared nails covered in brilliant nail polish, hair held together by so much lacquer you could smell it from outside the house, hands thin and veiny and my grandmother’s laughter.

It is not a shock to me that my grandmother’s death defined my life so much. In a way, it was a coming-of-age moment because everything before, it was about being in the dark, about a silently growing ailment.

I remember the afternoons before, as a secret world that I was dying to be a part of my mom would have lunch with my grandmother every day, and the would play word games like Scrabble after lunch. It was the secret world of adults when you could sit there and ask my grandfather if words like (blank) were valid. It was eating like my uncle, in muddy clothes in front of the tv and straight from the pan, sunny side up eggs made especially for him.

I became part of that world almost by accident because as life would have it, I am the eldest grandchild in my mother’s family, and I spent a lot of time learning to stitch, and play cards or scrabble in my grandparent's house.

All of this moments: hot chocolate and brownies, fights over words, and sleepovers belong in the before. A world shielded from the cruel reality that I was all too soon exposed to.

I didn't remember when it was that I learned my grandmother had cancer, but I remember in minute detail the first time I saw her as someone who looked ill. We were on vacation, and my grandma was about to get in the pool, but before she did, my aunt did something none of us had seen before: she took the carefully lacquered wig off my grandmother’s head, revealing a thin looking, hairless scalp. It was weirdly embarrassing, to see my grandmother in this state of vulnerability, and I remember looking away before I was caught staring.

There was no need for explanations, no need to tell me or any of us that she was ill. From that moment on I knew that my mother wasn’t just having lunch with her in order to get a brownie and play Scrabble, and that my uncle didn’t drop by after soccer just for food. They were cherishing every minute they could with her because they didn’t know how much time we had.

I remember my grandmother’s last words to me, as the last moments of the Before came to a strikingly quick end: I was about to leave for Oxford, for summer camp for a month, and she had been admitted to the hospital. I remember draping a blanket around her, because she was always too cold, and I remember her hand in mine. I always thought we had the same hands: thin, with long fingers and wrists that stood out too much. My grandmother called them “pianist’s hands.” She looked at me long and steady as I said goodbye, and then told me with firm resolution: “I will be here, waiting, when you come back.”

The morning she died, was a cold morning, too cold for late July. I was shaken out of my bed by the odd feeling that something wasn’t right, and I changed and went outside. The Swiss Alps engulfed the tiny city of Lugano, by the border with Italy, and I remember sitting on a bench on the TASIS campus watching the sunrise.

The minute I called my father I knew something was up, the first thing he asked me was if I was sitting down. My world of laughter and word-puzzles crumbled on itself, and the After started.

For some reason, the After seems like a slow-moving video. I remember feeling numb for days after the funeral like this big, stupid, void had opened, and it refused to close.

Part of the Before had been my faith: this unfaltering belief that God was good to good people, and it was in part because my grandmother believed in God so blindly. After she had died, my faith went with her, I had trouble believing that God would make someone ill for ten years, and then take them away right before the birth of their youngest granddaughter.

After I started to see, just how much my life was defined by those afternoons spent playing scrabble and questioning words. I had fallen in love with words, a world renown logophile, like my uncle who particularly loves monosyllables and palindromes. I owe it to my grandmother, the ability to be able to think of a 14 point word on Boggle, and to understand the value of a cup of hot chocolate for the heart. After was defined by the memory of smiles and eggs eaten out of the pan, and now the Before is not so unbearable to think about.