My fingers gripped the hard, warm plastic of the anxiety toy my grandmother’s nurse gave to me before my grandmother slipped into unconsciousness. The sight of doctors and nurses rushing to save peoples’ lives was disconcerting. I took a small sip of room temperature orange juice that I had gripped in my hand for three hours. My warm, salty tears started to flow down my cheeks in an even rhythm. I could hear the awful sound of heart monitors stopping every five minutes or so. I blocked out the sound of people crying, and I started thinking of those precious memories I had made with my grandmother before the heart attack. One particular memory that came to mind was when my mother and father were in a serious car accident and my grandmother came to take care of me for a year. While we were anticipating the time in which my parents would hopefully recover, she would drag my listless body to the zoo or to the park in hopes to regain energy in my being. At one point, she even joined a dance class just so a teenager could come and hangout with me. One time she came home from her class and I asked her why she would ever take pleasure in hanging out with women twice her age. She took a moment to figure out how to respond. She finally replied with “To keep my mind occupied with the present and not the past.” I just nodded my head, yet I did not know what she meant at the time. Some of my favorite memories I have with her during that year are the times when I couldn’t fall asleep. She would read me stories and then sing my tired mind to sleep.
I couldn’t feel my mother give me a soft tap until the tenth time. It was time to give a sorrowful farewell to the past and to enter the present. Those were the longest and the most difficult hours of my life. I can still see that happy yet sad picture of grandmother smiling in her sleep, as her body left this world. I would always remember what she had told me right before she died, “Remember the smile on my face as I leave this earth, not the pain of losing someone you love.”
I think that I now understand what she had said to me while she was staying with me. She meant that you shouldn’t stay stuck in the past, but move with the future and accept what is coming.
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