It began with a simple question from a student. A question that assumed continuity without ever naming it. Would Grandma make cookies? They missed her. They wanted to call and talk to her and to ask for treats. In the past, I had insisted on the ritual. You do not simply receive; you request. You call. You ask. Chocolate chip. Oatmeal. Sugar. Snickerdoodle. The phone call mattered as much as the cookies themselves. It was a small apprenticeship in relational courage, a way of learning that care is something you approach, not something you passively receive.
This time, there was no call to make.
When I told them she had died and that this was why I had been absent in December I watched something subtle but real register in their faces. They were not losing a grandmother of their own. They were losing access to something they had learned to trust. In that moment, I became aware not only of my own grief, but of the secondary grief unfolding through me. Loss, I am learning, does not respect clean boundaries. It moves relationally.
What I want to name more clearly now is the investment my grandmother made in them. It was an investment that was quiet, informal, and therefore easy to underestimate. She never met most of these students. She knew them primarily as stories relayed across a kitchen table or through a phone held in her hand. And yet, from a distance, she filled a need in their lives that many of them did not have met elsewhere.
Many of my students do have grandparents. What they often lack is not lineage, but availability. They do not have someone who bakes simply because it brings joy. They do not have someone to call and ask, someone who says yes more often than no. They do not have a reliable adult presence whose generosity is not conditional on performance, compliance, or success. My grandmother became, in this small but meaningful way, a symbolic figure. She became evidence that such care exists in the world.
Her cookies were never really about food. They were about recognition. About being remembered by someone who did not have to remember you. In psychological terms, this kind of care functions as a stabilizing presence. What attachment theorists might describe as a “secure base,” even when it exists indirectly. The knowledge that someone is there, that someone answers, changes how one moves through the world.
But the relationship did not move in only one direction.
As much as she filled a need in them, they filled a need in her. This is the part of the story that feels most important to say aloud. In the later years of her life, when the world inevitably began to contract, my students offered her an expanded sense of relevance. They gave her stories. They gave her purpose. They gave her a reason to bake, to plan, to anticipate. Most importantly, they gave her an audience for her generosity.
She needed to give. She needed to be useful. She needed to be seen and appreciated not as someone who had been, but as someone who still was. My students mattered to her not abstractly, but concretely. They were the reason the oven was preheated, the reason the phone rang, the reason her kitchen remained a site of outward-facing care rather than quiet withdrawal.
This mutuality is what makes the loss feel layered rather than singular. What ended with her death was not just a life, but a relationship, a reciprocal exchange of meaning. The photograph of her on the phone captures this better than any explanation could. She stands in her kitchen, phone to her ear, surrounded by the material evidence of a life oriented toward nourishment and welcome. She is not waiting to be needed; she is already responding.
For me, grief still sits close to the surface. I feel it in the silence of my phone. I feel it while shopping, standing in aisles meant for replenishment, aware that the mental calculations—how many students, which preferences—no longer carry the same anticipatory joy. And now, the cookies are my responsibility. This inheritance is not merely practical; it is ethical. The world expects continuity, even when continuity no longer feels natural.
For my students, the loss is quieter but no less real. It is the disappearance of anticipation. The collapse of a ritual that told them they mattered to someone beyond the institutional frame of school. Their grief arrives through me, filtered and refracted, but still genuine.
What binds all of this together is the recognition that care is relational at its core. My grandmother mattered to my students because she invested in them, even from afar. They mattered to her because they gave her a reason to keep giving. In losing her, we have all lost something different, but what we shared was real.
The phone no longer rings. The kitchen exists now only in memory. And yet, the shape of that relationship endures. It endures not as something that can be replicated, but as something that continues to inform how I understand care, teaching, and the quiet, transformative power of being someone who answers when called.