Norene Moss

As a proud Cardie, I’m thinking there may be a great card hiding in my story. :)

I was very fortunate to have my grandparents in my life for 52 years. They celebrated 75 years of marriage, so are members of what I think is a small but blessed group. I got pretty used to having them in my life, and never thought about them dying — it wasn’t until my grandfather reached his 90s that he even began talking about it. Instead, we celebrated every moment we were together.

When my grandfather said we needed to have a talk — I would have been 48 at the time — we sat down together and I saw a small teardrop starting to well up in the corner of his eye. It was the first time I had ever seen this from the man whose feet were so big that, as a little girl, I would stand on the tops of them and we’d dance all around the house. He was always so happy!

That day, as I was sitting across the table from him, he was oh-so-serious. He said, “You know I am not going to live forever,” and I replied, “Oh yes you are!” and started to get up. In a firm voice he said, “Sit down.” It stopped me in my tracks. I realized he was very serious and had something very important he wanted to tell me, so I sheepishly sat back down. He repeated that he wasn’t going to live forever and he had something he wanted to give to me. Now, most people might have thought “money,” but that never crossed my mind. In my grandparents’ 75 years together, they lived in rented apartments in Chicago, where they never owned a car and took the bus everywhere they went. They lived modestly but happy. So I knew the last thing he would give me would be money.

What he did give me was worth more than I could ever have imagined. He handed me a small bronze statue of an owl that he bought for a dime at the Salvation Army, where he always stopped on his way home from work. As I reached out to take it, he grabbed my hand and said, “This is for you, and I want you to put it somewhere in your bedroom so you will see it every night before you go to sleep.” Then he said, “Look at it and remember … owl always be watching over you.” That’s when I began to cry. He died that summer while mowing the lawn at a cousin’s house.

One last note about my beautiful grandfather. He never missed a day of work in his life. Memory eternal to the greatest man in my life, Harry Faber.

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