Priscilla says she has never met her granddaughter, who’s now 12. Maybe, she says, when the child grows older.

Time has a way of changing all things.

A visit long in coming

Priscilla walks through the line of gravestones, her eyes scanning the names. To the edges, to the center, back to the edges. She finds her way to an incline, a row of markers hidden under a thin layer of snow.

A breeze blows through the naked tree limbs, and the sound of faraway cars fills the air. Then, a voice.

“Here he is right here,” Priscilla says with a smile.

She stands there for a long time, saying nothing. She uses the toe of her shoe to push snow from Richard’s marker, adorned with a pair of clasped hands and a cross. Her shoe traces the marker’s perimeter, again and again, and Priscilla chuckles at her discovery. This is a reunion, but more than that it is proof that life’s most complicated things are love and death, and how we deal with them.

Priscilla’s gloves disappear into her pockets, but her eyes don’t leave the marker. As the silent minutes pass, the smile fades. Her lip quivers, and her eyebrows furrow.

“I love you,” she says, barely louder than a whisper. “I love you.”

She wipes a tear from her cheek, and it won’t be the last. She repeats the words. After more than a dozen years of sidestepping emotion, here she stands, experiencing so many.