Granny Weatherall has been through a lot. Twenty years earlier, when she was sixty years-old, "she had felt very old, finished, and went around making farewell trips to see her children and grandchildren! Then she made her will and came down with a long fever." But she didn't die, and she's been right as rain since then, and so she decides not to worry about death now because she already "spent so much time preparing for death" then. Her husband, John, had died fairly young and left her to raise the children and take care of the farm by herself. "Sometimes she wanted to see John again and point to them and say, Well, I didn't do so badly did I?" She did a great deal of hard work, fencing a hundred acres and digging post holes herself. She survived. She also sat "up nights with sick horses and sick Negroes and sick children and hardly ever [lost] one." She's proud of her successes and strength. The one thing she has trouble moving past is her memory of being left at the altar.

That was hell, she knew hell when she saw it. For sixty years she had prayed against remembering him and against losing her soul in the deep pit of hell, and now the two things were mingled in one and the thought of him was a smoking cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head when she had just got rid of Doctor Harry and was trying to rest a minute: Wounded vanity, Ellen, said a sharp voice in the top of her mind. Don’t let your wounded vanity get the upper hand of you. Plenty of girls get jilted. You were jilted, weren’t you? Then stand up to it.

She thinks about George, the man who stood her up and left her on what was supposed to be their wedding day, though she really does not want to. Her vanity was wounded, her pride injured, and that "jilting" seems to be the one thing that trips her up, the one thing she cannot let go of. As she drifts into death, she asks God for "a sign," but "For the second time there was no sign." The priest is there, just like when George jilted her, and God seems absent, just as George was. Granny interprets this as a singular "cruel[ty]" and vows never to forgive it. Thus, being left at the altar was so very troubling for her that she is holding a grudge sixty years later, a grudge that she extends to God himself.

The clue's in the title. Many years ago, Granny Weatherall was jilted at the altar by her fiance, George. This was a deeply traumatic event and has haunted her ever since. As she lies upon her death-bed, Granny Weatherall is tormented by the memory of that terrible day sixty years ago, when she stood in the church, wearing her lovely white wedding dress, waiting and waiting for her fiance, only for him not to show up.

Just how traumatic event this seminal event was for the old lady can be seen in the fact that her very last mortal thought is of the emotional pain of George's abandonment of her. Although Granny Weatherall's reached a great age—102 years old, no less—her fiance's rejection long ago has prevented her from preparing adequately for her death.