When my grandmother died two years ago, I began to formulate a theory about the roles we hold in our families and communities.

My grandmother was always the one to socialize, throw parties, connect the family, and try every new hands-on craft she came across.

(Seriously, she sold handmade candy, knit, crochet, sewed, painted in oils, acrylics, and water colors, gardened, took piano lessons in her 70’s, canned famously horrible relish every year…)

The older she got and the less she remembered as Alzheimer’s took her mind, the more I found myself doing things like making truffles and trying new knitting projects. Mom took over the family connection role. After Grandma passed away, I had a burning desire to own a lemon tree. Her original lemon tree is just across town where my grandfather and his gardener take care of it, but I needed one of my own.

(I think her name is Callie.)

My grandmother was also a bit of an amateur actress. Later that year I found myself accidentally acting in a children’s play for the first time in my adult life.

When my mom’s health was getting worse last fall, I realized that she was the one connecting all of us to all of our relatives and I went on a frantic Facebook search to connect with them myself. It was almost uncontrollable, as if those connections would forever be lost if I didn’t locate them before she died. (The prosaic practicality of the family address book did not occur to me.)

Mom would lose her voice for weeks anytime she got a cold. Minor cold? Major laryngitis. Only one in the family. She had to use a bell to get people’s attention and couldn’t talk on the phone. In the last month, since Mom died, my sister and I both got minor colds which have affected our voices (although not to the same extreme as mom’s).

So I wonder, when people die, what happens in the people who are left? Naturally, we move to fill the vacuum. Someone else steps up to be the family historian. Someone waits in the wings for her turn to be the matriarch. When the family comedian leaves, another family clown, thankfully, takes their place.

But what about specific things? What about lemons? What about laryngitis? Are there things which float about in the world we can catch when they are released by the death of someone close to us?

I had a visit with a friend last week. She brought me an African violet.

African violets were my mom’s favorite. I can’t remember a time when she didn’t have at least one growing in the window.

It was just a bit uncanny to receive one of my own.