That’s how I first experienced it.

Until that night, death had been something for someone else to know about. That night, it came for me to know.

Sometimes, life blindsides you. It leveled me on that cold, rainy night in February.

My granddaddy’s words, called from outside the window, were like a dream at first. Then far too real.

“Mother’s had a heart attack. She’s on the floor. I can’t get her up.”

Daddy and I ran barefooted across the sandy road and into the house that was dark except for the hall light. Pop was trying to lift my grandmother onto the bed. Daddy helped him. I couldn’t move.

As my daddy and granddaddy cried. I just stood there, feeling what death was like.

My grandmother, Maggie Johnson Caldwell died on Feb. 13, 1965. The next day was Valentine’s Day, my daddy’s birthday.

The loss of my grandmother was my first personal experience with death. It had come so close to me and I knew that it would come again. And, it has. But it doesn’t always come on cold, rainy nights. It just feels like it does.

Pop, my granddaddy, died at his naptime, just after dinner. Daddy at morning worship time on Father’s Day and Mama in the early morning hours of January 14, the day before her birthday – all, seemingly, cold, rainy nights in February.

But Mommie’s death and Daddy’s birthday had come as one – on Valentine’s. Daddy buried his mother on the day he was born.

On Valentine’s Day, Daddy always bought Mama a box of candy, the kind of box shaped like a big Valentine with a plastic flower on top and soft centered candy inside. Mama liked candy with nuts, so we, Mama and me, laughed that the plastic flower was for Mama and the candy was for Daddy.

The Valentine’s Day when we buried my grandmother, Daddy’s mother, Mama didn’t get a big, heart-shaped box of candy with plastic roses on top.

But, the next year, I looked out the window. “Mama, here comes Daddy with ‘his’ box of Valentine candy.”

She laughed.

The Valentine’s Day after Daddy died in 1983, I bought Mama a big, heart-shaped box of Valentine’s candy with plastic roses on the top.  We both cried.

After that, there would be no more big, heart-shaped boxes of Valentine candy with plastic roses on the top in our lives. We just didn’t have the heart for it.

Valentine’s Day was cloaked in sadness and would forever, thereafter, be a bittersweet day in our lives.

So, Valentine’s Day always puts lump in my throat as I think about Mommie and Daddy and that Valentine’s Day now so long ago. About Mama and my aunts, uncles, cousins and friends who are no longer here and as I try to tiptoe around the holes  they left in my life.

But then, there’s joy in the morning because of those here and now that I love so much.