Today is my Grandma’s birthday
And also the anniversary of her death.
As if she’d planned it–
To live exactly 98 years and then
Retire from this life
And the weary work of wearing
A failing body
To do all the things she had missed:
Traveling to new places,
Visiting with childhood friends,
Laughing with brothers.
Leaving the neat and tidy house
Decorated in all the styles
Of ten decades
And moving into a brand new one
That had no ghosts in the basement.
A house all aglow with light
With windows so clean
Standing beside them,
You could touch colors
You had never before seen.
Meeting again, as if for the first time,
her husband
Walking with him, holding hands
Through brightly-colored rooms
In which the walls were alive
With whispered hymns
And the sounds of instruments that
are too moving
to be played on earth.