When grandparents pass away, your Facebook feed may be infiltrated by “open letters” to them in heaven, talking about how heaven gained an angel and the grandchild has a new guardian angel watching over them. My grandmother passed away a week before Thanksgiving, but I’m not interested in the party she’s having in heaven (although she’s probably the life of it). I’m more interested in passing on the legacy she left behind.

My grandmother was way ahead of her time by a long shot. Born in Portugal in 1929, it was expected that she would get married, have children and stay in the kitchen to cook, clean and be a housewife. But she didn’t wait around for anyone. She fell in love with her husband-to-be at 18 who was visiting from Angola, a Portuguese colony at the time, and they wrote letters back and forth for ten years; she in Portugal, he in Angola. After years of communicating by mail, she finally said to him, either take me to Angola with you or I’m moving there myself. For a woman in 1957 to assert that she would be willing to move to another continent, on her own, for the hope of a better life is pretty incredible.

Once in Angola, my grandmother and grandfather built a mini-market with a connected home. My grandmother was left a widow at 44 years old with six children in Africa. When a civil war broke out in Angola, she was the only one protecting my father and his siblings from invaders, looters and arson attempts on the market. She piled her children onto a plane to Portugal to live with extended family and left Africa with nothing but the shirt on her back.

She was fiercely independent. I feel like it’s often easy to associate independence with selfishness; nowadays independent women are considered to be selfish because they may put their careers above having kids or getting married. My grandmother taught me, above all else, that it’s possible to be independent and completely and utterly selfless. Everything she did was for her kids. Moving to Africa for a better job opportunity, then moving six children to America for the promise of better academic and career opportunities not only exhibits independence, but unending selflessness.

My grandmother’s name was Generosa, which translates, in English, to “generous” and she could not have been given a more fitting name. She put her kids and her grandkids above anything else, while never letting up on her autonomy. The hardest thing for her was to admit that she needed help or to depend on others to care for her as her Alzheimer’s worsened. Even on her last day, as Alzheimer's began to take her, she didn’t want her children to worry about her, she wanted them to know that she was okay and that she was happy as long as they were safe and taken care of.