The winter light was hard. Unforgiving.

It made her look all the more frail, weeping in a fur coat: Irish eyes helpless with what had happened.

Her sister had died and my dad was taking her back to the Villa Adolorada where she lived and would die herself a few years later.

“My sister is gone,” I heard her say. “Helen’s gone. I’m all alone.”

My dad hugged her. “I know,” I remember him saying. “I know.”

He looked around in his top coat, uncertain about this place where the world had put him with his mother.

It was the only time I ever saw my grandmother, Mary Kay, cry.

I saw it out of the corner of my eye as I passed from one room to the next, all of 4 seconds some 40 years ago.

And it was forever.