My Grandmother's Song

My grandmother raised me after my mother left. She died when I was twenty-six. For years I grieved her in silence, not wanting to bother anyone with it. Last spring, at a gospel concert in a park — I had gone alone on a whim — the choir began singing a song I had never heard publicly performed. It was a hymn my grandmother sang to me as a child. A hymn I had never heard anywhere except in her kitchen, in her voice. I stood in that park and shook. Afterward I asked the choir director about the song. She said they almost didn't include it — it was added to the program the morning of the concert. My grandmother found me in that park. I am certain of it.