A little over a month and a half ago, I sat in the dining room at a fancy Boca Raton country club, and over pizza and steamers, heard my grandmother talk about watching the Brooklyn Dodgers in their glory days. I heard about cutting class to see the team win in 1941–and seeing her teachers at the game, about watching Pee Wee Reese and Roy Campenella, and, of course, Jackie Robinson.

The next morning, as my brother and I said our good-byes before we were about to head north, she made us promise that we’d come visit again, and that this time we’d stay for longer.

We both promised.

These are the things that haunt me, haunt me as I stroke her hand while she’s in an ICU bed, haunt me as I labor to understand monosyllabic words and short sentences from half-paralyzed lips, haunt me as I think about how for so long she’s taken care of us and now we have to take care of her.

These things haunt me then, and haunt me long after.

They haunt me in the nursing home, when every day I also say hello to Nana’s roommate, who’s blind but still tells my cousin that she looks like her daughter; they haunt me when I watch Nana try to eat pureed kosher mush since she’s still too weak to swallow solids; they haunt me when I look at the photos of a smiling, vibrant grandmother and I realize that it might be years before we get that back. If ever.

They haunt me, still, tonight, when I am, after a three day drive-and-train adventure, back in New York. They haunt me when my first game at Yankee Stadium this season just happens to be Jackie Robinson Day, and the conversation in the Pavillion dining room replays itself, word for word. Baseball. Brooklyn. Reese, Rickey, Robinson.

If I had known then, what would happen just a few weeks later, I would have pushed for more, more information, more stories, more memories.

After all, history books only tell you so much.