A refrigerator serves as the info desk for most families. Pictures of children (both homegrown and otherwise), art, phone numbers and, most importantly, pizza coupons are stuck to its doors with every sort of magnet imaginable. Emma Lee had only one thing on her fridge: a Do Not Resuscitate order.

Long ago she made her intentions clear. She would not, under any circumstances, allow her life to be prolonged by machines. Emma Lee believed in life. An unfettered life that allowed her to live by herself in her own home at the age of 80.

Three weeks ago, Emma Lee checked herself into the hospital. She'd been suffering from a particularly bad bout of shingles, and all of a sudden her breathing wasn't going so well either. Her doctor told her she'd need to go on a ventilator for three to five days in order to fight a lung infection.

Because she loved life and believed that she would beat this latest setback as she had all the others, she agreed to go on the machine. She trusted that if she could not recover, her family would make the right decision and let her die a dignified death.

Two weeks later, that's exactly what happened. As system after system failed, and a risky surgery looming, Emma Lee's children agreed to remove the ventilator and let nature take its course. She died a few hours later, living her final moments in peace.

Emma Lee is my wife's grandmother. The only grandmother she ever knew. My wife is Emma Lee's only granddaughter. Emma Lee wrote for newspapers. My wife is a newspaper reporter. They're both tough broads, southern style. Perhaps it is something of a simplification, but many of the things that I love about my wife came directly from her grandmother, skipping a generation entirely.

It's easy to get mad at Emma Lee for her demise. After all, she continued to smoke, even after developing emphysema and countless other breathing problems. Of course, she did live an active life right up until two weeks before her death, and she died well past the life expectancy of her generation. So no matter how easy it is to get mad about the smoking, that anger doesn't wash.

Emma Lee did not make life easy for the people she loved. She had an acerbic tongue and a stubborn temperament. If you did not hop to the step she prescribed, woe be unto you. Her wrath could be callous and cutting. And yet her heart was generous, her mind ever curious. She served the members of her church and community numerous of ways, volunteering even as her health declined. She didn't tie herself to her beliefs and was quite often willing to challenge her own thoughts.

She was a woman of the old South. Her children came of age at the time of the civil rights movements. Emma Lee knew that her fear of black people was unwarranted, but she never could quite shake it. One evening, after watching Eddie Murphy's version of The Nutty Professor on TV, she commented, "I don't think I've ever watched a movie where every person in it was a Negro." She said it in such a way as to make fun of herself. She knew her limitations, though she labored her entire life to overcome them.

The last time I spoke to her in person (just after Christmas), she let loose on me. The details aren't important (they never are), but she expended her arsenal on me. I knew she didn't mean everything she said, but I cried anyway. I cried because I couldn't think of her with the same admiration I once held. I knew her many shortcomings, but she'd never displayed them to me with such venom in the past. The disappointment is as painful as the intentional hurt. If she didn't mean so much to me, I wouldn't have been so upset. Even so, I know that I had to let my love for her overcome the pain. For the most part, and in all the important ways, it has.

My wife and I had some time alone with Emma Lee at the hospital. She was unconscious (conscious people do silly things like try to rip out the ventilator), her hands were swollen and her face was filled with tubes. Precisely what she didn't want. Like anyone who loved her, I wanted her to have every chance possible. When the doctors gave her little chance of survival off the ventilator, much less a return to the life of freedom that she loved, I knew what had to happen. Everyone did. That didn't make the decision any easier. Like I said, Emma Lee never made anything easy for her family. She left this final, wrenching decision to her family, trusting that her children would do the right thing. After a lot of crying and soul-searching, they did.

On the day of the funeral, I was moving some things in her house when I saw a newspaper clipping flit to the floor. It was a News & Observer editorial cartoon from sometime in 2000. In it a man is tied down to his bed by every tube, wire and machine imaginable. He's frantically punching the nurse call button, but only getting a recording that said something like "Your life is very important to us. Please don't die before we are able to take your call."

The cartoon probably was intended to illustrate a nurse shortage, but when I picked it up off the floor, I understood immediately what it really was.

Emma Lee's final thank you note.

Jon Worley raises his glass to Emma Lee Davis, the best grandmother-in-law he ever had.