Two weeks ago, my 96 year-old grandmother had a stroke. Saturday we will have her celebration of life ceremony. We were blessed as a family to spend an amazing three days together around my daughter’s wedding at the beginning of September, and I am so very grateful. I have lived the last six years with a growing awareness that any visit could be the last. Still those few days between her stroke and graduation to heaven had me looking back.

Grandma was a constant in my life. She lived on the family farm until about four years ago and then she moved into a duplex in town. You always knew she was up for a game and taught us new ones into the last year. In September, she was still beating us in multiple games, but Five Crowns was a recent favorite. If you’ve ever played that particular card game, you know it has multiple (unending it seems!) rounds of cards as you move from 3s to Kings. There are many times that as a family we will chose to shorten the game. Not Grandma. She was in until the bitter end — when I felt like I couldn’t manage all the cards, she didn’t let that slow her down.

Grandma was also the model for Audrey, the heroine of Canteen Dreams. Grandma would tell you I just borrowed her name, but there was so much more to both Audreys. Grandma grew up on a farm and taught in a country, one-room schoolhouse, before she married Grandpa. He was several years older than her, and they met at a dance, but as he said, Grandma needed to grow up a bit first. Grandpa was drafted four times and sent home each time as the only son of a farmer, the reality the hero in Canteen Dreams struggles with. The deviations? I had the Williard in the book on a ranch because the other part of the setting was North Platte and the Canteen that ran for years during World War Two.

Canteen Dreams was my tribute to the love I watched between my grandparents. It’s a love I will miss, but one I am so grateful to have experienced throughout my life. I am blessed to have had her in my life for all these years. And I’m very grateful I can celebrate that with absolutely no regrets.

That is a beautiful thing indeed.