Some of the most important breakthroughs can come to us in the strangest ways. In my case, the event that sent me down my path of realization was spilling chocolate sauce all over my clothes.
It all started last week when I was eating a bowl of ice cream. I’m a notoriously messy eater, so it was no surprise when a huge blob of chocolate syrup dripped directly down onto the center of my white sweatshirt. At first this sparked my annoyance; my day had been long enough, and now I had to deal with attempting to scrub out this stain. I groaned as I rolled off the couch to try to salvage my sweatshirt.
However, as I stood above the sink clutching a bottle of dish soap like I had hundreds of times before, it struck me that I wasn’t mad at all. Although I should have been annoyed with the mess I’d created, the familiarity of this moment brought me a weird sense of joy.
I come by my messiness honestly. My grandfather, Ed, could not keep food off his clothes for his life. This was not the only thing the two of us had in common. We both loved trying weird food combinations, telling stories, and swimming until my grandmother had to drag us inside for dinner. He was my best friend for this reason; he just understood these little things about me because he experienced them too.
When he died last spring, I felt that a piece of me was gone. The piece who laughed before he finished telling his jokes, excitedly shouted when he told a story, and would talk a stranger’s ear off if you left him alone for more than five minutes. The man who had shaped me in so many ways was gone, and I couldn’t imagine moving forward in life without him.
My freshman year I met an amazing group of people. It was bittersweet; I loved my friends, so it hurt to think they would never get to meet my first and closest friend.
However, spilling on my hoodie last week made me realize that’s not true.
In a way, they actually have met– through me. While he is not physically on this Earth anymore, many of my grandfather’s traits live within me. He is in my constant laughter, urge to chat with everyone I run into, and sense of adventure. All of these things my friends have come to know and love about me, he helped bring out. So while they never technically got to meet him, they did the first time they met me. Everyone who knows me knows him.
People say you are a mosaic of everyone you love. You are the sum of all the people in your life, a tapestry woven by the experiences they gave you. So while I miss him every day and always will, it brings me comfort to realize I never lost that piece of myself after all. He played a part in my life, so the person I am now will always reflect that.
While it took a puddle of chocolate sauce and half a bottle of dish soap, I finally figured out that grief can bring you closer to the people you love. It’s a reminder that we’re all just the bits and pieces of those we’ve loved, and we are lucky to have known them at all.