Eight years ago, I attended a gathering on my family’s farm in South Carolina on the day of the total solar eclipse. That same week, my grandmother, Sarah Graydon McCrory, went into the hospital with an infection from which she never recovered. In October of that year, just past her 96th birthday, Sarah died — and I got to stand by her on her deathbed as she grappled with connection and liberation, as she looked into the unknown with courage and clarity.

Sarah was a difficult person. People loved her, and she loved people, and she was direct and sometimes uncomfortably honest. She struggled with me: my gender, my sexuality, my commitment to anti-racism and to a way of life that was far outside of what she’d imagined for any granddaughter of hers. People remembered her as being frank and f

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