One person, though, who we sorely missed was my late grandma Nina. In her life, she set a high example for love of family and community, for how to be charitable, for what it meant to be Catholic even.

Most religions—but especially Catholic and Orthodox Christianity—place a strong emphasis on hagiography: of honoring great lives through words and imagery. My father’s family traditionally hasn’t been one for speeches, which makes honoring a great life hard even at a 90th birthday party, but the Scot-Irish in us wants to tell stories, so we end up doing everything obliquely. For example, the family yesterday made a scrapbook. Lindsay, who never got a chance to meet my grandmother, and I managed to design the final page. So we printed out this photo for Pop Pop…

…of me as a toddler with my grandmother. And I had Lindsay write, in her eminently lovely handwriting, “We’re so lucky to have so many great ladies in our lives.”

So Pop Pop: happy birthday. We miss her too.