I read a quote once — sadly, I always forget if it was Bitch or Claudia Gonson, two of my personal heroines — which said something to the effect that nobody besides your mother cares what you do with your life. And once you realize that, you’ll be a lot happier — i.e., after you’ve stopped even entertaining the notion of trying to please anyone besides yourself (and by extension, your mom).

It kind of makes me sad that my grandmother — specifically “Nanny,” my mother’s mother, only because I was closer with her in many ways than I was with my father’s mother, as she essentially lived with us in part of our house with my grandfather all our lives — never got to meet my current boyfriend. She died the day we got into our first significant fight, actually. It was the first real time we could have seriously broken up — I mean, it was quite early on in our relationship, so not all that much was at stake, and it wouldn’t have been as big a loss as later.

But we made up that evening, and as we were walking to the subway after hashing it out and making amends — he went his way and I went mine, amicably — Nanny died. I didn’t find out, of course, until getting home and getting a phone call from my mom. This was back when I refused to have a cell phone, and literally got the call on my old olive-green rotary phone hooked up to a landline and perched atop my dresser.

I’ve always wondered what it meant — the timing, that is, of Nanny dying on that particular evening. I’m not so self-centered or superstitious as to think it had anything to do with me exclusively, but I do believe that everything in the universe is delicately, unmistakably connected, and for the past five years, I’ve been looking for a sign: was she trying to tell us to break up or stay together? Was she saying it was okay for her to leave the world, now that she knew I was in good hands? Or was she demonstrating that bad things will happen if you cave and give in to the wrong person?

The last time I saw her, she was curled up in a hospital bed, even tinier than her usual tiny self, growing weaker by the second, but still somehow clutching on to our wrists with her usual superhuman grip, and smiling — forever and ever smiling her token sparkly Nanny smile. I’d just obtained a red flapper/suffragette hat, and I was wearing it when I visited her that day. I took it off upon entering her room, but of course they all — my mom and Pop-pop and Nanny — made me put it back on immediately, so that they (so that Nanny) could see what it looked like on Li’l Miss Country Gal Gone City Slicker. And Nanny’s face lit up — I can still remember it vivid as yesterday — since I must have reminded her of her younger, pre-marriage Li’l Miss Country Gal Gone City Slicker self from the 1930s.

I’d just gotten all my hair cut off into what the boyfriend described as a Mia Farrow circa. Rosemary’s Baby ‘do, and the hat was more for him than for my own benefit. I love the “idea” of hats more than the actual wearing of them, but this one? This one spoke to me — I picked it up cheap in a knockoff accessories shop on Broadway in Washington Heights — and when I saw Nanny’s reaction, well, I held onto it. It didn’t end up shoved to the back of my closet as quickly as other hats would’ve.

Ever since then, I’ve wondered: in what ways would Nanny have advised me on my current relationship? Or is it better that she wasn’t here to advise, forcing me to make decisions (or, rather, to refrain from making any decisions at all, ever) by myself? She married her drycleaning deliveryman. Was that her fairytale? Or was the city her fairytale — or were other, distant, realistically unattainable but no-less-worthy-of-preoccupation things her fairytale — and her marriage and children the reality? The no-less-remarkable, triumphant reality?

I believe she was smart enough to know the difference all along, and I guess even if she were around in the flesh these past five years, she’d have merely smiled enigmatically at me and never given me a direct answer about any of it. But while I know my own mother just wants me to have a normal life — to recognize happiness and refrain from rocking the boat — I could have used at least a few more years of silently conspiring with Nanny, of her calling me a trooper and telling me to go set the world on fire.

I could have used a few more years of not having to make the life-changing decisions she was grown-up enough to make when she was more than a decade younger than I am now. And I could use a sign that when I finally get around to making those decisions myself, I won’t regret them any less than she did for the 65+ years she stuck to them without a backward glance.

Because I’ve gotta say the Li’l Miss Country Gal Gone City Slicker routine is getting stale — the Mia Farrow hair and hat are both long gone — and I’m wondering if it isn’t time to step up to the plate and Do Something™.