A lot of my friends had already lost a grandparent by the time we were in seventh grade, or had never gotten to know a grandparent. Some of them had grown up with three, or two, or even fewer if they'd come from another town and didn't see them. So I felt privileged to have four living and local grandparents.

That all changed when my mom's mom died a few weeks before Christmas in 1989.

I've alluded to her sickness in a few posts already. My grandma was God's testing ground for horrific diseases. She had tuberculosis when she was young, which was why she'd moved to Albuquerque in the first place (for the dry desert air). She had polio too, which required her to wear a hip brace and walk with a cane. But that wasn't enough -- when I was probably six or seven, she completed the trifecta and acquired kidney disease.

She never let it get her down, though. My grandma was a gruff woman, but one of the most loving and loyal people you could ever hope to meet. She'd bark at us to get down off the couch, or stop climbing the shelves in the pantry, or put down those knitting needles and stop playing swordfight, but we knew it was all about making sure her grandsons didn't get hurt, and there was usually a cookie in it for us.

Right to the end, when she had to lean on my grandfather to walk anywhere and breathe assisted with a bottle of oxygen, she never stopped taking care of us. My mom would be working in the kitchen, busting her tail to get Thanksgiving dinner on the table, and my grandma would be right in the middle of things, trying to help.

When she died, there was a little sigh of relief, if you listened under our crying and wailing. Sure, my grandma was gone and we were all sad, but she was finally no longer in pain. Besides, she could have gone a lot earlier -- if you thought there was actually a chance she was going to give up that easily. She fought tooth and nail for every last second of her life, and I like to think that determination colored us all a little bit.