I try to imagine my grandmother’s life. When I met her in 1970, she was living outside of Jackson, Michigan. My father hadn’t seen her since he was five. I have one picture of her sitting between my parents, with my sister, under a watercolor of bare-masted boats and impressionist water. I thought she’d painted it. She showed us hers, smaller, unframed.

Calm, I can’t imagine that her life started that way. She bore twenty children; spent years in a mental hospital. Beginning in 1933, she lost her children; her world changed. I try to imagine, but it’s really hard.