Pat Hall

My grandmother, and last surviving grandparent, Pat Hall, died Thursday morning. It was the day after her 91st birthday - hence the name "Pat".

She died two years to the month after her husband of nearly 70 years, my grandfather Don Hall.

She was a lucky person - active and busy up to the very end. On her birthday, my aunts and uncles all gathered at her home in Houston and threw a party for her. She had seemed - from the distance I'm at - to have bounced back as well as possible from Grandpa's death.

And yet after nearly 70 years with someone, it must have been hard to go on. I have a hard time imagining that; after a ten-year marriage that splintered like furniture from Wal-Mart, I have a hard time picturing ever investing that much of my soul in another person; it seems oddly foolhardy, almost criminally stupid. "They *will* let you down, the cynical (or maybe just bruised) subconscious tells me.

And yet, there they were; from 1935 to 2002, always with each other, through bad times (a depression, a war, decades of teaching in skinflint rural high schools) and good times (three kids, nine grandkids, six great-grandkids and a step-great-grandkid). Always together, looking out for each other, whether being the big couple in college (they were homecoming royalty) to galavanting around Asia and tearing up every golf course in Phoenix in their sixties, to being each other's seeing-eye people in their eighties and nineties.

The fact that people like my grandparents ever existed gives me hope, and justifies some faith in humanity. I'm very glad I was able to know them.