Last week, my maternal grandmother Mary, my Bubu, died at the age of 99. The end of her life, sleeping in a hopspital bed with my Aunt and Cousin at her side, was as quiet and uneventful as her early life was chaotic and unpredictable.

As a small child, my Bubu lived through the departure of her parents and two older brothers from Poland in 1913 when she was five years old. She watched the German and Russian armies fighting back and forth through the little towns where she was living during World War I. And she experienced the deaths, one month apart in 1917, of her grandfather and grandmother in whose care she and her little sister Anna had been left.

Mary and Anna nearly starved to death during the war. The uncle who was supposed to bring them to the United States died suddenly just before they were supposed to depart, and the other uncle who eventually set out with them went blind during the trip and was sent back to Poland from England, leaving the girls aged 11 and 13 to journey on alone. Once they reached Ellis Island, they were met by a brother who could not prove that they were related, prompting the immigration authorities to hold them until paperwork could be sent. When they were finally reunited with their family in Denver in 1921, they no longer recognized their mother. Their parents divorced soon after.

In 1924, at the age of 16, my Bubu wrote the following for a school assignment which my aunt found recently while going through her papers:

“Essay on Man”

We don’t know what the future has in store for us. The only thing that keeps us going is the hope and faith that God has planted in our hearts.

No matter what happens to us, we always hope and believe that something better will come.

In our greatest distress and worst situations, we keep on hoping for “better.” In the hour of death, or seeing death before our eyes, we don’t give up. We struggle and hope to live a little longer, because we believe that the future might hold something nicer, better, and happier than the past.