I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmothers lately, and what their lives must’ve been like. Marguerite Dudley and Florence Jeanette Evans. They both lived through a lot. The Great Depression, World War II, each lost two husbands. Sometimes I wonder if I look like them. Somehow I think I have their eyes, both of them. Sometimes I wonder if I knew either of them in a past life. If I did, I’ll bet we got along.

People have told me things about them that make me wish I knew them better in this life. Marguerite made the best pies in the whole county, for instance, and Jeanette was considered the prettiest girl in Bonham, Texas. But of course they were more than pies and pretty. I remember them both as being defiant in a way I can’t quite articulate. It was a subtle defiance, perhaps, something lurking just under the surface; pies and pretty and a little something extra.

On Labor Day I went to a party in Denver at my friend Michelle’s. I ate a hot dog and some potato salad. Michelle turned on the sprinkler so that the kids in attendance could play in it, and I remembered doing the very same thing when I was their age. Running around the backyard in my swimsuit, my grandmothers watching. Both of them, there, watching. My mother’s mother, Marguerite, died very suddenly when I was in the sixth grade: brain aneurism. She was making the bed and boom: silence. Done. My father’s mother, Jeanette, suffered a much slower decline: Alzheimer’s. The last few years she didn’t talk. It was a silent end, a lengthy, painful, frustrated silence.

So many things end in silence, I suppose. Everything, really, is clutching and silence.

The day after the party, Michelle sent me this video. I can’t stop watching it. It reminds me of something, a life I don’t remember, my grandmothers’ lives, maybe. At some point, I may have lived a life that looked and sounded very much like this. It likely also ended in a colorful but silent parade after some simultaneously horribly mundane and outrageously beautiful goings on.