I was pregnant with my first baby when my grandmother died. The last time I saw her,  she had moved into an assisted-living facility where all of her worldly possessions were condensed down to two small rooms. She had been condensed down, too, from the tall southern woman of my childhood memories into a pale and thin ghost of herself curled in an armchair. She was 80 years old and had been battling metastatic breast cancer for 15 years. She must have known when she was diagnosed that the cancer…