My grandmother never had spectacular health. Since I was a kid, she hobbled around on either a cane or walker before she graduated eventually to a wheelchair in which, at family dinners, I rolled my cousins around the house while my grandma swatted at us with her picker-upper stick and shouted, “That’s not a toy!” What was even less of a toy was her electric scooter, and it was also much more fun.

In the last couple of years, my grandma became bedridden. I do not think she would have used that word. My grandma was an optimist. “Bedridden” may imply some failing or inevitability. My grandma did not have that outlook.