Two weeks ago, I took my kids to visit my grandmother for her 101st birthday.

We brought her favorite things: flowers, pictures the kids had drawn, and a family-sized bag of Cheetos. At 101, I feel you have earned the right to define “family-sized” however you please.

For that afternoon, all was right with the world.

She seemed like herself. She could hear us clearly, knew who I was—although occasionally she thought I was my cousin—and listened while my children supplied a substantial amount of information about Dumplings and Nee-ohs. I cannot tell you whether this information improved her understanding of the modern world. I can tell you she was given plenty of it.

But it was a good visit. We had shown up. She had enjoyed her gifts. We had celebrated another birthday, which, after a certain point, begins to feel less like a milestone and more like a standing arrangement.

That was Saturday.

By the following Friday, she was dead.

And our world, which had seemed perfectly capable of carrying on as usual, was completely rocked.

There is something about a person reaching 101 that makes you quietly stop believing they can die.

You know better, of course. You understand the basic terms of being alive. But someone who has been here for more than a century begins to feel permanent. She was already old when I was young. Then I grew up, had children, and brought them to visit her, and there she still was.

At some point, without realizing it, I had mistaken longevity for permanence.

It didn’t help that she had reached this extraordinary age without making much effort to follow the instructions.

She smoked. She drank instant coffee. She never exercised a day in her life. She died with Cheeto-stained fingers.

If there was a secret to her longevity, she declined to share anything useful with the rest of us. Those of us attempting to drink enough water and occasionally take a walk would apparently have to work it out on our own.

I find enormous comfort in those orange fingers. They are such a small, ridiculous detail, and yet they belong entirely to her. In a week full of things I could barely comprehend, there was something familiar: Grandma had been eating her Cheetos.

The harder part to write is that my grandmother was not an easy person.

I loved her. I have wonderful memories of her. Neither of those statements makes the rest of the story untrue.

Growing up, her house was a place for sleepovers, playtime, and holidays. It was part of the geography of my childhood, one of those places you assume you will always be able to return to, even after you are too old for anyone to arrange a sleepover.

Those memories are real.

So are the things I understood later.

She was a very different mother to each of her three children. My aunt received a kind of coddling that my father never seemed to get. My uncle could inspire enormous pride in her despite behavior I found hard to admire.

And my dad seemed to struggle for the approval she gave so freely elsewhere.

This was a man who earned a degree, devoted himself to his community, and helped raise four self-sufficient, independent children who went out into the world prepared to make lives of their own. There was so much to be proud of. Watching her struggle to acknowledge it was painful.

She disliked my mother, too. Eventually, my mom stayed away. It wasn’t worth the fight, and I understand that decision.

These things don’t fit neatly into a birthday tribute. They fit even less neatly into the things we tend to say after someone dies.

But I don’t want to write about a grandmother who never existed. I want to write about mine.

She could be loving and difficult. She could make a place feel welcoming and make a person feel unwelcome. Different people knew different versions of her, and they weren’t necessarily wrong about the woman they knew.

One of the more unsettling parts of getting older is recognizing yourself in people you once thought you had figured out.

I see a lot of myself in my grandmother.

She seemed to want people around, but also wanted to be left completely alone. I understand this arrangement very well, despite its obvious logistical problems. I would like the people I love nearby. I would also appreciate a stretch of time in which none of them needs to ask me anything.

She liked hobbies and projects. She liked having something to work on. She held firmly to her convictions, which is an admirable quality right up until you are the person trying to change her mind.

People who knew her casually often saw a kind, lovely woman. Those who knew her well had a longer story to tell.

Recognizing those similarities makes me smile, and it makes me pay attention. There are things about her I am glad to carry forward. There are other things I hope to handle differently.

I suspect that is part of what we inherit, too: not just the traits themselves, but the chance to decide what to do with them.

She lived through hell and was still here, 101 years later, to tell us about it.

I don’t want to use that as an excuse for every hurt she caused. But it is part of her story. She was a woman with a century of experiences behind her, many of which I can only understand from a considerable distance.

She was a warrior. She was an innovator in her time. She had convictions, interests, and a stubborn determination to keep going. I admire her for that.

I also wish some things had been different.

I am discovering that grief leaves plenty of room for both.

There are the memories I want to revisit and the ones I still don’t know what to do with. There is gratitude for how long we had her and shock that we don’t have her now. There is the reasonable knowledge that 101 years is an extraordinary life, and the entirely unreasonable feeling that she ought to have stayed a little longer.

Mostly, I keep returning to that Saturday.

The flowers. The pictures. The family-sized bag of Cheetos. My kids talking away while she listened. Her voice on the phone that evening, telling me she had wanted to go to dinner.

It all felt so ordinary.

I’m grateful it did. I’m grateful our last visit was a birthday visit, with gifts she liked and children who had things to tell her. I’m grateful we went.

And I still wish I had known there would not be another one.

For a blog called Running from Everything, this is the part I have no clever way around. I don’t know how to make sense of losing someone who has been part of my life for as long as I’ve had a life.

She was complicated. She was stubborn. She was loved.

She was Grandma.

And I am still trying to understand a world in which she isn’t here.