In Memoriam, Oma - Amanda Knox

“How’s your day been,” the barista asked me, and I immediately began crying. “My grandmother just died,” I said. It had been a few hours. I’d just seen her body lying in her bed, so much smaller than the woman I remember, the color drained from her face. My daughter, at 4, was able to understand that something momentous had happened, but she wasn’t ready to face it. My son, at 2, was picking up the mournful vibes, unsure why everyone was so bummed. After viewing her body, my mom, my sister, and my husband took the kids to the park where they screamed and chased each other around the playground for an hour. A part of me was there, playing with them, while another part was stuck in my memories of Oma. She had had a hard life. Her family’s ancestral home in East Prussia was lost during WWII, along with her mother, who died from a bomb blast when she was 5. Her dad became a prisoner of war, and she was raised for a time by her oma. They nearly starved to death in post-war Austria, and she

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• Megha Jain