Anne K. Ream on the legacy of her Mom, Mimi Taylor Grimes.

I suspect that this openness really took form during the second half of her life, when – in her late fifties – my Mom made the difficult but necessary decision to leave the midwestern life she had always known and start a new life in Santa Barbara, California. I don’t think even my siblings and I, who had helped her make this decision, fully grasped how devastating it was for our Mom to lose her marriage, leave her adored students, sell her home, and begin anew at roughly the age I am now. She had lived her whole life within a ten-mile radius of where she had grown up!
 
What moves me most about that time isn’t so much what our Mom did, in upending her life. It’s all that she did not know when she did it. We like to imagine that the events in our lives are inevitable. But our destinies hinge on a series of choices, chances, and fortuities. Mimi could not have anticipated that in California she would land her dream job at the University of California-Santa Barbara, meet our beloved stepfather Joe, go on to travel the world, become a gentle but insistent gender-justice activist, and take part in the 2016 Women’s March, her first-ever public protest.
 
She certainly could not have imagined that in the final year of her life she would meet and marry a new husband, David Grimes, a man who saw her in a way that I don’t believe any person had ever seen her before.
 
As my Mom and I talked over the years, I came to understand that when she left for California in the mid nineties, she was not – contrary to what I thought at the time – optimistic. What she was was hopeful.
 
The distinction between those two words – optimism and hope – matters, especially now. The optimist is certain (maybe a little too certain) that things will work out. But the hopeful person takes the leap into the great unknown, aware that a safe landing is never guaranteed. Yet still … they leap. That was the essence of Mimi.
 
We face a world of unknowns right now. We are living through terrifying, maddening days. But if my Mom’s life taught me one, beautiful lesson, it is to have the courage to leap. The quality of our lives depends on this. The lives of so many others do as well. 
— Anne K. Ream