In them, she is slight, less sturdy than I had been led to believe. This memory runs counter to even the few photographs I’ve seen of her.
She was 76, and it happened quite suddenly, as she was crushing aromatics for dinner on a grinding stone. I never met my great-grandmother Osunfunke Thomas (nee Olatunji), but I’ve formed an image of her from the story of her passing, as told to me by my mother and her sisters. There are family members we never get to meet, those whose absences are filled by the memories of the people who knew them.
