An Adult Orphan

Losing my mother at 67

Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

“No matter how old you are, when you lose your second parent you feel like an orphan,” my Aunt Edy said on a cool day in the fall of 1971, the day of my grandmother’s funeral.

Her mother, my beloved grandmother, Nanny Frida, had just died of heart failure. Edy was 50, I was 14, and it was hard to imagine a fifty-year-old orphan. Still, my father had come a hair’s breadth…