Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up. ~Anne Lamott

My mother's family is full of fiercely independent, stubborn people. The majority of us will try everything we can to do something ourselves before asking for help. We put Ikea furniture together without looking at the instructions. We search on our own for the right button to push on the electronic equipment to make it work. We drive miles out of our way before looking up directions. Because we KNOW we can figure it out on our own.

And sometimes, we fall down. Sometimes, we suck it up and look at the complicated pictures on the Ikea papers that come with our new desk. We pull over and ask the guy at the gas station in the middle of nowhere how to get to the right highway.

We don't like it, but there comes a time when we just can't do it on our own. There is a stopping point to our wild freedom of independence. We can't always do what we want, how we want to do it. I can't believe I just wrote that and I'm letting it stay out there, in print. Staring at me. I want what I want, when I want it, how I want it. Makes my skin crawl to be aware that I can't always.... ugh.

I wasn't always this way. As an adolescent and teenager, I was lost. It's hard to grow up. Not something I would ever want to re-live. After school and on weekends, I would often sit in my room and just cry. It seemed that my life was a series of awfulness that would never end. Thank goodness for the solace of MTV and the strong presence of my grandma.

When I could no longer stand to be around myself, disgusted and depressed about whatever the latest dramatic event was, I'd put my sneakers on and walk over to my gram's house. She'd ask me what was going on and I'd spill it. Everything. I knew she didn't like a lot of what she heard, and she had no idea how to fix whatever was going on and I also knew she'd heard a lot worse from her own children.

She'd sit with me in her living room and share stories of her own childhood, of her motherhood, of her christian faith and all the trials that people in the bible had gone through. All of life's troubles make us stronger. We learn when we fail. We become more empathetic to others when we have been to rock bottom. Understanding awfulness helps us to relate to others and to make fewer mistakes - or at least, not to repeat our mistakes. Sometimes.

When I went to see Gram in the hospital yesterday, after her second stroke in a month, and she had a hard time remembering who I was, and then laid there, clutching the rail on her bed, whimpering in pain and closing her eyes, I wanted to leave. I wanted so badly to get up and walk away. It was too painful to see this woman who I have always known to be tough and kind and almost angelic - lay there, completely helpless.

I pinned myself to the chair at her bedside and willed myself to stay there. Not because I could do anything to help her. Not that she really cared that this woman who seemed to know her was, for some reason, staring at her and saying meaningless words, but because I realized that she probably felt the same much of the time when I showed up at her place after school, wrecked.

She wanted to help me when I was in need. She wasn't able to swoop me up and put me in a bubble and make everything better when I sat in the chair next to her and sobbed about teenager problems. But she never, ever asked me to leave. She never told me to suck it up and stop asking her to sit there with me when she'd rather be reading the paper.

The most valuable thing she did for me was to sit there in my presence. Not really understanding what I was going through, but proving that I mattered enough to her that she was willing to let me need her to be there.

After the nurses brought Gram's supper in last night and gave her medication for her pain, she was a little more responsive. Less terrified-seeming. I wondered, as I helped her get the food situated so that she could use the fork easily enough by herself, if there was any of that fire left in her. If she was really still in there at all.

When I went to cut another piece of her asparagus up and she shook her head at me - and proceeded to fork it into submission and make it work all by herself, I knew. She was determined to eat her supper herself. If it took her five times longer without help, she was going to do it.

That tough, independent woman is still there. My rock- the rock of eight grown children with their fiercely individualistic lives - may be confused and confined to a noisy and uncomfortable hospital, but she's very much the same woman she always was.

Later, her doctor stopped by and asked her about her therapy for the day. How'd it go? He got a blank look in return. She didn't reallly know what he was saying. He asked again - Did you get through any of it today? Did you do anything in therapy? She shook her head, no. He told her that her brain would come back in a couple of days. That she needed to keep trying. She nodded her head, understanding this time.

A little while after he left, between bites of pineapple where she'd scrunch up her face, surprised each time by the taste, she'd furrow her brow and press her temple. She kept pushing on it, over and over, then she'd move to the middle of her forehead, as if to say - hurry up, brain! Then, she'd take another bite and do it again. Impatient and persistent. She wants her brain back now. She's in there, desperately trying to forge her way through a fog.

It's comforting to know that, even if someday I find myself in the same place, my roots are as deep as hers. My personality may fade and my physical functions may not cooperate, but I'll always have what she gave me and the rest of our family. Determination. Stubbornness, independence that will not allow us to give up. Not even in the face of the seemingly impossible.

It won't be a miracle if she finds her way back to some kind of normalcy. It will be the same thing that introduced us all to improperly built Ikea desks, unfamiliar back roads in weird little towns off the wrong highway and absolutely unique, unexpected experiences. I am thankful for my stubbornness and for the woman who taught us all the beautiful art form of going the wrong way.