"Get some business about yourself!"

Her white crocheted hat sat just so, her gold watch caught the light, and she laughed into the back of her hand the way only she did — like the joke was a small secret between her and the room. To the grandkids she was Momma. To a few she was Granny. Either way, her lap was a country we all carried passports to. Sunday afternoons smelled like coffee and whatever was warming on the stove, and the table was longer every year because she kept making room.

The early years did not love her back the way she loved. She kept the worst of it folded inside her, and when she spoke of those days at all it was to say they were behind her now. She raised her children through it, and her grandchildren after, and somewhere in the long arithmetic of surviving a man who should have been gentle she decided the rest of her life would be made of softness — slow phone calls, hands on cheeks, the same stories told again because the telling itself was the gift. She turned what broke her into the thing that held the rest of us up.

She used to say it plain, in that voice that did not need to be loud to be heard: get some business about yourself! She lived it down to the last afternoon. We carry it forward in every kitchen that smells like hers, in every grandchild who learned that warmth is a discipline you practice on purpose, in every quiet moment we still feel her hand on our shoulder.

Momma is gone and Momma is not gone. Love, the way she did it, doesn't end where the person does.