Dear Grandma Johnson,
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you, but not a day has gone by where you haven’t stayed with me.
There’s so much I wish I could tell you. I wish I could sit at your kitchen table again while the smell of cheeseburgers fills the air and cats start gathering outside, waiting for their nightly feast. I can still picture you, scraping the dinner scraps into that old coffee can every evening and mixing them with canned food before stepping outside to feed your feral crew. They’d come running down the hill like a little army of ghosts, wild and hungry, but you never flinched. You treated them with gentleness, like they mattered. And they did. Because to you, everything with a heartbeat mattered.
You once told me you can always tell someone’s character by how they treat animals. You were right. You lived that truth in every way. You showed kindness to the overlooked and the discarded—not just animals, but people, too. Especially me.
When I think back to my childhood, so much of it was cold. Quiet. Missing the things that should’ve been automatic—hugs, kind words, someone to notice when I was hurting. But then there was you.
You called me Sweetie. You wrote me letters that told me I was special. You told me you loved me, and you meant it. You made me feel seen when I didn’t even realize how invisible I felt everywhere else. You didn’t just hug me—you held the parts of me that were breaking before I even knew they were broken.
Your house was magic to me. Not just because of the candy bars and the cooler full of forbidden sodas—though, let’s be honest, those were amazing—but because it felt like walking into a different world. A world where I could breathe. A world where love didn’t have to be earned by staying quiet or being good. It was just there.
You died when I was still a teenager, and it felt like the one person who truly got me disappeared. But you didn’t, not really. I carry you everywhere. I see you when I feed my own herd of misfit animals (although it is a much larger and more diverse group). I remember your strength, your softness, your way of loving without condition—and I try every day to live up to that.
Some nights, I dream of haunted rooms. Of voices in the dark that sound too familiar. But I think if you were still here, you’d sit beside me in those dreams. You’d hold my hand. You’d say, “It’s okay. I’m here.”
And I’d believe you.
I hope wherever you are, you know how much you meant to me. How much you still mean to me. And how everything good and kind and warm in me has your fingerprints all over it.
Love always,
C.
