As a freshman in college, I’ve already experienced so many “firsts.” I’ve moved to Saint Louis by myself, I’ve made a completely new group of friends, and I’ve kind of learned to adult all for the first time.
Along with this, however, just a few weeks ago, I’ve also dealt with losing a family member for the first time.
My grandfather.
I’d gotten the text from my brother in the middle of class, but I knew it was coming.
I’d been preparing for this for a while, considering my mom had already left the country to be by his bedside just a few weeks prior. In a way, it was like defeat was a slow coming front. I knew the worst was going to happen, yet when it finally came, it had still felt so unexpected.
The way I had initially dealt with it was by completely shutting it down, so far down until I convinced myself I was fine about it.
This is why.
My grandfather and I had a lot of our firsts together.
I was his first grandchild, and he was the first person I ever looked up to.
He was the first person in our family to ever go to college, which carved the path for me to go to college now.
I’d always admired him for being the trailblazer for our family. By pursuing higher education, he consistently sought out to remind my brother and me the importance of educating ourselves, as that would make us a better, more sophisticated individual in society. In a way, learning, educating, and shaping our minds seemed like a pillar he built into our family. Every time we would see each other, we talked about the different books we’d read, which would often result in me spending hours scanning and borrowing his decade-old novels. My peaked interest in writing also rooted from him, as I’d watch him write about his day in his journals. This, as a result, made him the center of a lot of my writing, as it was his life stories that first got me interested in learning more about my family’s history.
He was also the one that first began instilling important lessons, advice, and stories into my upbringing. His world centered around family, discipline, and making sacrifices, and he was clear on passing that on to future generations. Whenever we were together, he made sure we were as disciplined and precise in everything we were doing, just like him. If I was eating, every grain of rice had to be eaten off my plate. If I had moved the couch even as little as an inch, you already know I had to move it back that inch. But even with this, he always valued family. He always made sure my brother and I were occasionally a little more than well-fed (I mean how could we turn him down!!), he always looked forward to hearing about we were doing at school and in our lives, and even managed to love us enough to learn how to text in our family group chat or facetime us every weekend. He demonstrated what love is, even if it wasn’t always so obvious.
This past summer, I had the opportunity to visit him with the feeling that it would be the last time I would see him. I joked around with him, took plenty of selfies with him, and spent every waking minute asking him about his family, his life, and telling him about my goals and my future. In a way, it felt like a full circle ending, that instead of fulfilling my “firsts” with him like I had been my entire life, I was now spending my last few days with him, completing my “lasts” with him.
The best part of it all is that he’s seen me grow up to the person he’s impacted me to be. And with his passing, I’ve realized that mourning his death is not about the fact that he’s gone, rather a celebration of our close bond; the first celebration of his life (and many more to come).