If you remember this post, the chance meet-up at Copenhagen Bakery in Burlingame, confirming that sense of belonging for her as an adult now–I’m so glad that happened. It needed to happen.

Today I was throwing my arms around Helen. It’s so hard, and yet, especially given the last few days (and the confirmed death of the speeder in Michelle’s accident Thursday), dying because this is 2013 and you were born in 1922 and have lived a full life as a loving, giving person…

It was a lovely service at the church celebrating a good woman who is missed keenly.

I don’t think I ever told you, and I don’t know if you remember, I told Helen afterwards. (I’d wondered why I hadn’t mentioned it before. Maybe because today was going to be the day she would most need to hear it? I can only guess. It had looked like she was going to be adopted out of state to a couple that had never even seen her before and her great-grandmother was fighting for custody, fighting the idea that she was too old to raise the child.)

You were I think four, I continued. Marnie and I went to the courthouse that day to testify for your grandmother. They wouldn’t let us in the courtroom because we weren’t family so we stayed in the waiting room praying hard. And I’ve been praying all the years since for both of you.

We wept together.

Yes, her great-grandmother had been old. But she had wanted to see her little girl grow up and belong to the survivors among her own who knew her and loved her and to get the education Mary had never been able to have, and Helen was now in college.

Mary was 91. She slipped peacefully away, knowing her Helen was well loved and supported and on her way.

And she had succeeded. Helen is the soft-spoken, kind, caring, very image of her beloved great grandmother. Everything one could hope for one’s child to grow up to be.

And we are all there for her as she continues forward.