Remembering Nana

We are up in Toccoa this weekend to attend the wedding of one of Rob’s oldest childhood friends. Today after the boys took a journey with Papa to goats on the roof for some goat-and-chicken-on-roof viewing and ice cream consuming, we visited Rob’s mother’s grave.
Today while Rob and his dad walked down to the cemetery office to discuss questions about the grave marker we are ordering for Nana (it has taken a while for us to feel ready to deal with these sorts of important details), I stayed near the grave site with the boys.
Will and Owen collected fall leaves from a nearby tree, searching for reds, oranges and yellows that they thought were especially beautiful and placing them carefully in the floral arrangement at Nana gravesite.
“Would you like to say anything to Nana?” I asked them.
“I two,” Owen said, holding up two fingers.
“I love you, Nana,” Will said and blew her a kiss.
“I love you, Nana,” Owen said.
Then Will ran off to collect more leaves and asked me to start reading the names on other grave markers nearby. We calculated the ages of each person when he or she had died and Will left a few individual fall leaves for people he’d never known.
Not long after we’d looked at the grave marker of a woman who had died at age 98, Will told me, “I want to live until I’m one hundred and two.”
Later he asked me if I still remembered Nana. I told him I remembered her well.
“Do you remember Nana?” I asked him.
And without a pause he answered, “I remember Nana. I’m going to remember her until I’m one hundred and two.”