Esther Vuolle is in her 20s. She is heavily pregnant, standing at her wood-burning stove. It is 2 a.m. She is heating another bottle for her baby. She is tired, but it is July 10, 1919 and exhaustion isn’t a discussed emotion, so she suppresses it. Her baby cries in the kitchen. Her unborn child moves in her belly.
 
She sighs.
 
She looks around her house—how lucky am I to live in such a gorgeous place?—she thinks. There is no natural light. Only the flicker of a kerosene lamp. She grabs the bottle. It burns her hands. It cools a bit. She walks to her baby, swaddles it and gently leans the bottle to its lips while speaking softly. The baby is happy.
 
The following day she is out in her garden, the nicest garden on Caledonia Street in Calumet, a bustling mining town in Northern Michigan. Men yelling to each other on their way to work, women stopping by with extra honey. Esther is happy. John, her husband, is busy at work that day—and most days—as a blacksmith. She loves him, but only because she is Finnish, and so is he.
 
She continues to garden, her baby in a sling on her back, her nearly born baby in her stomach. Esther has a deep knowing that birth will come soon. Maybe today.
 
Day turns into night. John comes home—how are you feeling? Where is my dinner? Why isn’t the sauna ready? Esther just looks at him, babe in arms, bottle in its mouth. She says nothing.
 
He makes his own dinner.
 
Esther sleeps, wakes up, goes out to her garden and then it starts. A slow wave inside. Something happening. She alerts the elderly neighbor next door, who has her grandson run the half-mile into town. One hour later, the midwife is there and Esther is lying in a bed upstairs. A basin filled with warm water sits by her side, a damp cloth on her forehead.
 
She breaths deeply—oh, God—she whispers. This is God’s will, Esther, the midwife coos. It won’t be long.
 
John flies through the door—I’m here! Esther looks up from the bed, smiles. Hours tick on, the pain increases. And just as the light from the windows—light that had been warming her face in bed for the past what felt like 1 million hours, but may have been six or seven hours in reality—shifts to a warm golden glow. It is early evening, Esther’s favorite time of day.
 
She takes a breath. Steadies herself. John holds one hand, the midwife holds the other. The birth is quick, painful and ends with cries—cries of a newborn. A birth that will impact thousands of lives for a century and more.
 
It is in that moment, on July 12, 1919, that Irma Ilene Vuolle is born.
 
                         

Happy July, Friends. I’m starting this month’s newsletter with a piece of fiction I wrote in a writing workshop two days ago. I say fiction because I have no way of knowing what Esther was doing on July 10, 1919. Or what her relationship with John really was like. Or if there was a midwife.
 
But the rest is true—the names, the places, most of the circumstances.
 
On this day exactly 100 years ago—Saturday, July 12, 1919—my Grandma was born in a white paneled house on Caledonia Street in Calumet, Michigan. She never went by Irma, only by Ilene. I’m fortunate to have been gifted Ilene as my middle name. I am also fortunate to have lived the first 36 years of my life in close relationship with her. She passed away on August 2, 2017, two days after getting surgery for a ruptured appendix. Other than that one incident, she lived most of her 98 years in good health, one of the most joyful human beings I’ve ever met.
 
Joy was in her cells, even though she experienced a mindboggling amount of pain and loss in her life. She sang around her house every day. Her enthusiasm for life and for listening and for loving overflowed in every interaction, even during a five-minute phone call. She was the rock of my family, the matriarch.
 
When thinking about this month’s newsletter, I knew I had to write it today. My thought process was to honor my Grandma by doing things that brought me joy today, instead of falling into a heap of tears. But this morning I woke up with a heaviness that I couldn’t explain. I slept late and sat on the couch, numb, looking out the window. Wait, I should be experiencing joy! I’m honoring Grandma!
 
But the joy wouldn’t come. What the heck? I thought. Why can’t I snap out of it? So, just now, I drove to a nearby trail with Lucy. Left my phone at home. Half way to the trail I started to cry. Let yourself cry, Katie, a voice told me from deep inside. And so I did. The villain in my head who thought it was a good idea to only experience joy sat in the corner of my mind pouting with its arms crossed as the love that is deep in my soul allowed me to cry. To let grief wash over me. Tears are coming to me as I write this now.
 
I walked on the trail and took in the light streaming through the trees and just breathed. Maybe I can’t tell myself how to feel in a particular moment. Maybe I just have to be present and accept what is. Humph. Interestingly, once I approached acceptance, I started to feel joy. I looked back on the trail and saw Lucy running towards me, smiling. I noticed falcons flying overhead. I watched the beauty of the trees as the wind moved branches in a dance.
 
And now I’m here. Back at my house, feeling lighter. 
 
I think about my Grandma a lot. She is in my mind only, though. Pictures of her are not yet in my house. They used to be, when she was alive. But after her death, the daily reminder was too painful for me. I’m hoping someday that pain won’t feel like such a sharp knife, and I’ll have a pic or two framed on a shelf. Her death is the biggest lost of my life so far. I recognize my incredible privilege in this—in living 36 years without a massive loss.
 
But here I am, experiencing grief and all of its smooth and spiky parts. In its sneaky meanness and its wash-over-your-face sadness. In its lightness, too—I’m only experiencing that lately—remembering her quirks (and there were many). I spoke on stage about her back in May 2018 (you can see the five-min clip here), only seven months after her death. Back when I gave that talk, I’m not sure I realized the permanence of her passing.
 
That part is the biggest bummer.
 
But still, life moves on. And lately I’ve been feeling more curious. Curious about what it was like when she was born. I mean, 1919! Esther gave birth to her just eight months after the end of WWI. Calumet, which is now a mostly-vacant town of less than 700 residents, was a bustling city of more than 25,000 people back then. It was called Red Jacket, after a local Native American tribe—not officially getting the name Calumet (after a mining company) until 1929.
 
What gets me is that someone who was born a whopping CENTURY ago could have such a colossal impact on my life. And still have an impact. And still be teaching me things. And if I ever have children, they will know about her. And maybe their kid’s kids will know about her. And the fact that advances in technology and culture and food and brain research and early childhood development and—well, name literally anything—have exploded (in good and bad ways) since she was born. I remember explaining what a Kindle was to her about 10 years ago. She looked at the contraption, and then up at me and said, “Katie, that is hocus pocus.”
 
To her, it was.
 
So today, my work is to accept what I’m feeling even if I’m pissed at that feeling. Life isn’t a gift-wrapped package, tied up in a gorgeous bow from Nordstrom. It is a rollercoaster through rainbows and shit piles.
 
What a ride.
 
Happy Birthday, Grandma.

                          

 One of the last photos of us together, taken less than a week before she passed.