Grandpa, I miss you
I know you didn't want to be mourned, but how was that possible when you were so bright and loving? Fifteen years have passed since your death, I graduated, I have a fiancé, everyone has moved on, but I feel my life is incomplete without you. I want to see you next to me, call and tell you about my day, show you my groom and my ring, you would like them both. Sometimes when I don’t know what to do, I think about what you would say and it helps me make a decision, but I’ve already forgotten your voice and face, the photographs are not you, they don’t give me what I want to see. You don't even know my younger sister; she was born six years after your death. When we talk about you, she doesn't understand why I go quiet, and you can never explain to her what a wonderful person you are. But sometimes I try, I tell her and my fiancé about my childhood with you, and for a short moment I can forget that you are no longer here, return to that moment, to the other shore. I remember every fish I caught with you, I remember every evening outside the city next to you. I came there only years later and it is no longer the same place that it was with you.
I don't talk to my grandmother much, forgive me, but she's not alone and she's fine. It's just that when I talk to her, I feel like something's missing from this equation: you. I don't live with loss, but loss always lives within me and the more good things happen in my life the more I want you to see. My graduation, my wedding and possibly my children. I even got a dog, just like I dreamed of as a child. You would have liked it, although you would have said that it was a mouse and not a dog.
My mother once said that on the day of your funeral I felt like I grew older, and thinking about it now, she was right, my childhood died with you, it was taken by the same cancer that took you. I may not return to my childhood home, to my grandmother's apartment; it brings nothing but pain. My real home remained somewhere there, fifteen years ago, in that very cemetery. I'm sorry I never came to visit the grave again, I'm already far away, and even if I were close I wouldn't be able to. I just can't see you on a tombstone again because when I forget you're dead I can just imagine you're out there somewhere, living with your grandma and just knowing I'm okay. And everything is really good with me, I am living, growing and sincerely smiling at the new day.
Although sometimes I still cry at night thinking about you, forgive me for that, I promised not to cry, but I was a child and did not understand what grief I would have to bear and it turned out to be impossible not to cry.
I just hope that at the end of my life, the last memory I have will be of how, as a child, I fished with you on the shore and knew nothing in life except your love. I love you, miss you and grieve you endlessly, your granddaughter M.