My granny passed away today, just a few days after her 98th birthday.

The last few weeks were quite difficult – she had a heart attack, pneumonia, and a pulmonary edema; the last few years perhaps even more so, as she suffered at times from dementia. She was certain that, of all her 10 grandchildren, I was sneaking into her room, stealing her remote control, sleeping in her bed, messing up her knitting. That’s a weirdly awful position to find oneself in, even if it wasn’t “about me.” Family tried to reassure her that I was halfway around the world, in California and not in Surrey. She wrote me a couple of rambling letters, thinking that I was coming to visit her and that she’d missed me because she was out in the garden.

I always sort of dreaded her letters. She wrote me many over the years, most admonishing me for the things she perceived I did wrong – getting pregnant, getting a PhD. My granny, I bet everyone in the family will attest, was something of A Letter Writer.

From left to right: My aunt Audrey (my namesake), my granny, and my mum. Taken at my aunt Carol's wedding. (1969)

We had a strange relationship, Granny and I. I spent a lot of time in England growing up, and the two years I went to high school there, she was in effect my guardian.

We didn’t agree on much, and mostly it didn’t matter. Sometimes I feared her, and sometimes I ignored her. But truly, I loved her.

She represented, in my childhood imagination, England. She was Thatcher-esque, in some ways, in politics and austerity. But she was family. (And she was never, as Russell Brand’s powerful obituary of Thatcher recalled, left unloved or alone.) Granny could be stern, even prickly – it was partially her personality, partially her accent, partially her title. That's at least how I, as an American child, read the signals. (My dad never ever called her “Betty” incidentally, always insisting on the more formal “Lady Pretty.”)

I admired her tenacity with the daily crossword puzzle and her fierceness in Scrabble. She made a strangely delicious fish pie. She had wild strawberries in her garden, which I preferred to her strawberry jam. She always kept dark covered chocolate biscuits in the cupboard. She took me to France, and she took me to Scotland.

She took me in; she led me out.

One time when I visiting her for a weekend away from school, I was brushing my teeth late at night, and I heard a scratching sound above my head. I jabbed my toothbrush up at the ceiling in her cottage, and it went clean through, unleashing thousands and thousands of wasps which had been nesting in her roof for years. I had to wake Granny up – challenging since she didn’t sleep with her hearing aids in – and we had to barricade ourselves in her bedroom that night as the house was infested with angry, stinging, buzzying insects.

I’m not sure I ever apologized. I am certain that later, we laughed again and again about that story. We laughed quite a bit, considering that she was, by most accounts, quite proper. I inherited from her this tendency to get the giggles and then completely unravel into uncontrollable tears of laughter. (I did not inherit "proper." Her title - "Lady Pretty" - was awarded, not inherited after all.)

Her father, I should note, worked in sweets.

I don’t remember her husband, my mom's dad, my grandfather. He died when I was only three. I was, as most people my age find themselves, the grandchild of the “greatest generation.” If they were “the greatest,” we were always left to feel, I suppose, necessarily a bit less. That generation lost a lot, I do realize. And the women like my Granny, who juggled children and blackouts and rations, weren't knighted for it. (For what it’s worth, all my cousins, all her grandchildren and great grandchildren are amazing.)

I only knew Granny as a widow. I didn’t expect to be widowed early in life either, but I learned from Granny how you must truly seize life.

And, here today, I learn again how to know when to let go. I’m not sure Granny always understood that in her letter-writing, truth be told, or in her sometimes domineering oversight of her children and grandchildren. But in her own personal life, I think, she did. Sometimes you have to sigh and admit it is, as they say, simply for the best.