She used to tell this story about being at a dinner party with Elizabeth Taylor and Shirley Temple and seeing Elizabeth Taylor do this strange thing with her hands. Elizabeth Taylor's elbows were rudely on the table, on either side of her plate, and her fingers were steepled together, and she was pressing her fingertips together. Someone eventually asked her what she was doing and the answer—and here grandma's eyebrows would shoot up to the ceiling and she would laugh her trademark ooop! ooop! laugh—the answer was that Elizabeth Taylor was doing breast exercises. Elizabeth Taylor was doing breast exercises at the dinner table. “Can you imagine?” Grandma would say. "Can you imagine?"

She lived for stories—any experience was worth it if it ended up a good story. But she usually downplayed the one I always wanted more detail on: During the Great Depression, when she was 9 or 10 years old, her job was to beg for money by the side of the road. Her parents would leave her on the shoulder of the highway and drive off (with her siblings), because people might stop to talk to a 10-year-old girl by the side of the road but they would never stop for a whole family.

Not having to ask other people for money became one of her big things, a lifelong ambition. Unfortunately, she married a politician. They had four children—the youngest is my dad—and the glamorous life she'd envisioned for herself, starting in her teens when she was discovered in a department store by a fashion photographer, went by the wayside. She had a little more success in modeling in early motherhood (she was the mom in an Eastman/Kodak print ad in Life magazine in the 1940s), but it didn't amount to much, except that she got to socialize occasionally with people who were more glamorous than her. For the rest of her life she daydreamed, bitterly and endlessly, about what might have been. She was still dwelling on what might have been when I went to visit her in Southern California this last Christmas, a month after her 90th birthday.

I flew down there to spend a week with her, and she read me a lot of her creative writing and I sat at her dining room table and did a lot of writing of my own. One day the cousins came over, and the next day we woke up to a gigantic pile of trash. While I was writing she decided she was going to get some exercise by taking out the trash. Her legs were basically shot, but she had a walker, and one of the small trash cans clipped to the walker, so she could only take out a small portion of what there was to be taken out, but by God she was going to help, and she wanted me to sit there and not worry about her and enjoy a moment of silence in the apartment.

I knew it would take her a while. She had to go out the door, down the exterior walkway, into the elevator, down three floors, out to the Dumpster, and back—but after a good long time had passed I got worried and went out to check.

The elevator had broken after she rode it down but before she could ride it back. She was stuck at the bottom of three flights of stairs. We looked at each other for a while. She was winded, defiant, in disbelief, and helpless, but she wasn’t going to admit that—that was never her way.

I told her I was going to carry her up the stairs. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, she said. I told her I’d been lifting weights. No no no no no, we will not be doing that, she said. I told her it was only three stories, like 60 individual stairs, and she did not weigh much and I would not drop her. No no no no no no no. I pleaded with her, but she wouldn’t have it—possibly because she was wearing an adult diaper, which I was not supposed to know, although anyone could tell. She had way too much pride for it to be discovered that she was wearing something like that.

She said, I am going to go up each stair one at a time, backwards, on my rear end.

A ridiculous idea, but there was no arguing: This woman redefined stubborn. She did whatever she damn well wanted. So I said okay.

It took her about two minutes to work up the energy to push herself up one stair.

The next stair took about 4 minutes.

The next stair took about 10.

And then I said, “Grandma, here we go,” and I put one arm under her neck and one arm under her knees, and while she gasped and ooop’d and swore up and down I was going to drop her, we glided up those outdoor stairs like it was the easiest thing in the world. Everything else went away when she was in my arms like that—all her glamorous cocktail stories, all the old fights, her sad childhood, her sad adulthood...

For such a prickly person, she was so easy to hold. Not heavy. Not difficult. I had her in my arms and I was carrying her toward the sky. She would die a month and a half later, of natural causes. I remember wanting those stairs to last forever.