There are moments in life that seem small as they happen - a soft voice offering milky tea, the rustle of a turned page and the tartness of gooseberries from a garden - but years later, they surface with unexpected clarity, like notes from the half-forgotten nursery rhymes she sang to me.

I wonder if Gran sensed, as she read aloud the tales of Nicholas Thomas, the naughty kitten, with his “impertinent ears, inquiring nose and extremely inquisitive whiskers” that she was placing in my hands the threads of narrative - character, voice, and story - and moulding my soul? I wonder if she knew that afternoon, as we sat together poring over the poetry of Hopkins, that she was igniting the passion that would become my profession.

In the front of my copy of her memoirs, she warned me not to read it with too literary an eye, and yet it was her voice, her cadence, that shaped my own. As a child, I dreamt of being a writer. This faded as I grew. But then, at ninety-seven, Gran handed that dream back - waiting for me to whittle words into wonder because I was generations away from being too geriatric.

Twenty years ago, when she and Boppa drove all the way from Johannesburg to Pietermaritzburg to meet Joshua, did she realise that her arrival anchored me? For the first time since becoming a mother, I no longer felt alone. In her, I found “the still point of the turning world”.

Her legacy is not only in the stories she shared, or the birthday cakes she baked, but in the strength that comes from feeling seen, the comfort of being safe, the deep security of being loved.

I will “carry [her] heart with me (I carry it in my heart)”, in every poem I write, in every text I teach. Her love remains, wrapped in the scent of baking shortbread and bound into books. Gran will live on, shaping my life with her echoes, and “death shall have no dominion”.