In 2003, when I was seventeen, my grandmother died. I know that’s a hell of a first sentence for a basketball story, but it’ll make sense in a second.
Just before the Christmas holidays, my grandmother, who was ninety-one or maybe even older at the time, suffered a bad fall from which she would never recover. My dad called to tell me what was happening, called to tell me he was flying out from California that very night to be with her. I was already living in NYC, having moved there on my own the year before, but I was able to get a ticket early the next morning and fly to Detroit where she was in hospice in her home.