I remember that it was a warm summer morning. And I remember that I had on a t-shirt because I kept glancing down at the small lump on my left arm, just above my elbow. It was about the size of a marble and when I pushed down on it with my finger, it rolled back and forth beneath my skin. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t feel right either. We were walking to the hospital—my grandmother and I—where I was scheduled to have this lump removed from my arm in what everyone was referring to as a procedure. I remember being nervous and afraid, and I remember that my grandmother held my hand all the way to the hospital. I was five years old.

The next thing I remember is waking up in my grandparents’ bed with a fever. I didn’t know how much time had passed. Hours? Days? I didn’t have a clue. I was unable to eat, but I wasn’t really hungry. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, nobody did. I fell back asleep. Now and then I’d open my eyes and see aunts and uncles shuffle past. They’d lean down to look at me and they’d touch my forehead; if they spoke, I don’t know what they said. I was sweaty and feverish for days.

And then one day I awoke and wanted nothing more in the world than french fries. They appeared before me and I ate them all very quickly. The fever had broken, and I slowly began to feel better. It took several days to regain my strength, and I spent most of those days in bed being read to by my grandmother or watching television on the couch in the living room. I had all but forgotten about the procedure to remove the lump from under my skin until one day I looked down and saw three wiry black stitches sticking out of my arm—coarse and alien. The lump was gone; the incision, a thin scabbed line.

I recovered fully. The stitches were removed. I went back to sleeping in my own bed.

My grandmother and I were talking about this one day a few months before she died, in a hospital room just blocks from my home. The same hospital where I was born, and where my youngest son was also born. When I arrived at the hospital to see my grandmother on that particular day, she was concerned that she didn’t have on any lipstick, so I helped her apply some. She was skeptical of the job I had done applying the lipstick, and asked me several times if it looked okay. I assured her that she looked great. Many of our visits during those final months involved sharing memories back and forth. We’d talk almost exclusively about the past, rarely about the future. We’d sometimes challenge one another to recall the earliest memories we could still access in that way that is part mystery, part miracle. My grandmother was 100 years old. Hospital visits can be a little fraught at that age. Everything is a little fraught at that age. But she was still able reach far back into her memory and vividly recall something that happened 96 years earlier—which I found astonishing then and still to this day.

When she was four years old, my grandmother took a train with her uncle and his wife to go stay with them for a couple nights. It was her first time away from her parents, and that first night, in her cousin’s bedroom, my grandmother awoke alone in a big bed. Finding herself in a strange room, far from her parents and siblings, she began to cry. Her uncle came in to the room, picked her up, and rocked her back to sleep, singing quietly the whole time. I told my grandmother that I loved that her earliest memory was one of being comforted, of feeling safe and protected. I said, That’s incredibly sweet. Yes, she said, it was.

After I reminded my grandmother about the day we walked to the hospital together to have the cyst removed from my arm, she recalled how sick I was afterwards and how worried she was about me, how worried everyone was. I’d had an allergic reaction to one of the anesthetics they’d given me at the hospital, but for whatever reason, they wouldn’t tell my grandparents what it was. I didn’t know at the time, of course, but it turned out that there was concern that I might not recover. I had no idea that was the case until my grandmother told me that day in the hospital all those years later.

But I did recover—in my grandparents’ bed, where I ate french fries and sat listening while my grandmother read stories to me. Some things we remember for a reason or because of a feeling: holding my grandmother’s hand on the way to the hospital that morning I was having surgery (let’s call it what it was), her reading books to me in bed, always, always being there for me. Never did I feel unloved by her, never unwanted.

The American writer Willa Cather wrote that “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen”. And then we spend the rest of our lives processing it on the page. That’s me, editorializing that last bit. I think Cather is mostly right, or right for many of us, anyway. I see it play out in my own work—again and again. I see it play out right here, right now.

About ten years ago, I mentioned to my grandmother that I had written a short story based on something my grandfather had told me—a story about a winning lottery ticket and a misunderstanding between two men who shared the same name. My grandfather loved telling stories, and some he’d tell again and again—I called those ones his hits. I told my grandmother how I had borrowed elements from several of his stories over the years to include in my work. My grandmother smiled at me and said, I have stories, too, you know. And she told me a story then about her father and how, upon learning that their family home was on fire, he ran to the house and straight inside to retrieve a framed photo of his wife—my grandmother’s mother, my great-grandmother. That was the only thing he took from the burning house. And I said, That’s incredibly romantic. Yes, she said, it was.

The last time I visited my grandmother, I knew it would be the last time I would visit my grandmother. Knowing this felt both comforting and tragic. Comforting because how often do we know when it’s the last time for anything? And tragic because, well, that’s death. I sat next to her that day and held her hand. She was heavily sedated—and the result was that she mostly slept, and when she wasn’t sleeping, she was half awake and mumbling. She had lost a lot of weight and her face was sunken in that way that reminds you there is a skull beneath our skin. She found most touch to be painful in her final days—everything hurt at that point. Her skin like paper, each vein lined thinly beneath like rivers on a map. I took a photo of her hand in mine. I wanted to be able to look at it later, when I felt differently, when I wasn’t overwhelmed. Every now and then I come across it: some days I skip right past it because I’m in no shape to look at it; other days, I linger on it and can recall the feeling I had holding her hand then, and holding her hand when I was five and afraid.

A few months after my grandmother died, I felt an ineffable pull to visit the house in Nova Scotia where she was born and the nearby beach where she played and swam as a child. And so that’s what I did. As a boy, I had spent a week or two staying in that house; I even slept in the room that both my mother and grandmother were born in. One night during that stay, a car crashed through the living room wall and into the house. I remember opening the door of that second-floor bedroom I was sleeping in and seeing the headlights of a car shining brightly at the bottom of the stairs. The driver died before his car even hit the house. A heart attack. I remember a big blue tarp covering the hole in the wall for the rest of our stay.

It took me two days to drive to Nova Scotia from Ontario, and there was no good reason for doing so—other than some emotional need that I couldn’t exactly explain but that everyone I told seemed to understand. I walked on the beach where my grandmother had walked as a child and out onto the rocks that jut into the ocean and are filled with small tide pools where I played as a child. I made coffee on a camp stove in the sand dunes and drank it while watching the waves roll in. Afterwards, I drove down the road and parked outside my grandmother’s childhood home. It looked pretty much how I remembered it from when I was a kid. The blue tarp was long gone, though probably still decomposing in some landfill down the road. I stood there dumbly and laughed at myself for driving all that way to do what exactly? I still don’t know. After a few minutes, I got back in the car and drove home.