Continuing our venerable family tradition, my grandmother died early this Easter morning. Her husband died ten or fifteen years ago, exactly one month after Christmas. My other grandfather died on New Years Eve, and my other grandmother died the day after Christmas.

She moved from Nebraska to an Oklahoma dairy farm when she was a girl, where she learned to say “creek” instead of “brook.” Her older brothers soon left for California, in hopes of escaping the Dust Bowl and becoming extras in a Hemingway novel.

She met my grandfather Clarence while he was riding around in his friend’s car one afternoon. After they had five children (four of whom survived) and outlasted the Dust Bowl and World War II, she convinced him to move out of Grady County (and such locales as Chickasaw and Ninekah) into Bethany, then a distant suburb of Oklahoma City. They bought the last house in Bethany that still had chickens and cattle in the back yard. My grandfather started working in the lumber yard for his cousin. My grandmother started her long years of working for department stores. And my pre-pubescent father spent the summer pulling up all the posts and chicken wire in the back yard. She saw to it that the house was painted her favorite color: green.

When she was well into her thirties, Clarence bought Helen a wedding ring, jealous of imaginary ne’er-do-wells stalking the department store hoping to pick up my grandmother. The two oldest children were married and moved to Texas. The two youngest got married and moved to different ends of Bethany. In retirement she took to making afghans with increasingly unique color schemes while Clarence continued to edge the yard with a hoe and tried to tell stories without my grandmother correcting his exagerrations. (“Now, Clarence…”)

She is survived by four children, twelve grandchildren, and fifteen great-grandchildren. One grandson, upon learning that grandmother never cooked with sugar–a habit that was never broken by mere recipes–decided to ask her to make french fries instead, which she gladly did every Friday when he came over for lunch from the nearby high school. Her children remained sharply divided over the merits of her mince meat pie; she brought two every Thanksgiving.

I last saw her two weeks ago in Baptist Hospital in Oklahoma City. She had just had major abdominal surgery to repair her small intestine. While there, she was diagnosed with progressed Alzheimer’s, an ailment that managed to find both her brothers in California too.

When I came into her room, she stared at me as though she didn’t recognize me. My father looked at her and said, “Look who came to see you all the way from Atlanta.” She looked at me for the longest time, and then looked back at my dad and smiled. “Doesn’t he work?” she asked.

Later that week, I was teasing her about not running away with any of the cute male nurses–at least not until I had checked them out first. She stuck her tongue out at me. We listened to some music together on my laptop, and when I showed her the animation of Dubya dancing along to the music she laughed.

When I left Oklahoma City to return to Atlanta, she winked at me.