It began with my grandmother’s early morning phone call: she wanted me to help her die.

In 1977, Terry, a young woman of thirty, drives from L.A. to Las Vegas to see her grandmother. ‘Gram,’ is seventy, cranky, in failing health, and fed up living alone in a senior facility with just her fellow gossips and ‘vultures’ for company. She pleads for Terry’s help.

Convinced this was just another cry for attention, Terry expected the trip would turn out like all the others; she’d fetch a few groceries—mostly beer and cigarettes—and listen to Gram’s complaints about her numerous illnesses. How wrong she was.

Gram wanted to die, and this time, she was absolutely serious.

Terry learned that Gram had ‘Plans.’ Terry was to invite the rest of the family, her mother, her step-sister, and a distant cousin, to a pre-Christmas party where, Gram said, “I have important things to tell you girls. Things you need to know before I die.”

“Gram & Me” is a heart-wrenching, sometimes starkly humorous, story about mothers and daughters and their relationships with each other. Tracing events over seventy years, it tracks how the challenges and tragedies of one woman—and her fifty-year-old secret—impacted the lives of each successive generation. During that week with her grandmother, Terry not only learns the history of her grandmother’s life but how that inter-generational trauma ended up as her own.

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