I thought about my grandmother today. I had beers with a friend, and I started to cry. I felt guilty because there had been a couple days that had gone by that I hadn’t thought about her or my grandfather. She loved me. She was one of the few people I actually knew loved me. I’ve had so many dreams about her since she passed. The most recent one is the closest I’ve come to her.

I’m standing in my mother’s kitchen looking out a window that isn’t there in waking reality. I see my grandmother standing in the backyard. Until this particular dream, I have never been able to see or touch her when I dream of her. I beg her to wait, and I open the door. She is then standing at the foot of the back porch, wearing a dark green cardigan with matching polyester pants and a plaid shirt.

I throw my arms around her and whisper in her ear, "I miss you."

She replies, "I’m always here."

The comforting thing is that even though she’s been dead for two-and-a-half years, I still feel the love in the absence of her physical presence. But there is, understandably, a longing—to sit on a sunny afternoon at her kitchen table and smoke a cigarette with her while we talk. The ceiling fan would blow the smoke and heat around the room, and we’d make sure there was a cold soda in front of us.

"How are you doing in school?" she’d ask.

" Okay, I guess," I’d reply as the Javier Solis poured from the record player in the living room into the kitchen. The silken guitar would ping, and his voice would envelop my heart, evoking a memory with senses.

"You need to stay in school and make your mom proud," she always said.

My grandmother had less than an eighth-grade education, but she was the smartest woman I knew. She managed all the finances and still had money left over from her and my grandfather’s Social Security to contribute tons of money to various Catholic organizations and to three poverty-stricken kids she sent money to. I think she knew I wasn’t doing well in school but knew I had hidden potential and someday I’d find it.

Thinking about our mornings in the kitchen always leads me to the one conversation we had about death. I looked at her face; it was worn. Old and tired. Her eyes were yellow and her brow heavy. Her cheeks sank in when she didn’t have her teeth in, which she never did. She hated falsity. She never wore make-up or got one of the fancy old-lady do’s. She was a tough woman but still so scared, and that day she told me she was afraid to die.

"Abuela, are you afraid to die?" I straightforwardly asked her.