Living Memory

Arthur Briceno

Professor Gaylene McPherson

English College Composition

9 September 2014

The Growth of a Human Being

When you were first told about death, did you think it was a person or a moment in time? Did you really understand what the idea of death was or did you play it off because you could not accept it? As a kid, I always thought people lived forever but slowly I learned that was not the case. The lesson I learned changed the way I saw the world and how it shaped my understanding about life itself and my own. I was only 11 when I first got to see my grandfather alive and dead on the same day.

It was just another regular day, went to school and came home to my grandparent’s home and waited for my mother to pick me up. We went to the hospital because my grandfather was sick, which would explain why my grandpa wasn’t home that day. My grandfather’s name was Arturo Salinas. We got there and I and my siblings were waiting in the waiting room until my mom came and took just me to him to his room. When I entered the room and saw his face, he was laying on the bed frozen like a car without gas. It looked like the soul had been sucked out of him. I can remember seeing my aunts and grandmother there in the room and I could not understand what they were feeling, I could just see it on their faces but later in my life I would be able to step back in time to that moment and really engulf the moment.

I saw my grandfather dead, and I was numb in disbelief, because I had just seen him earlier that day and he was just fine. I did not know how to deal with it or how to understand why he left us behind. The people that really helped me throughout my years were my mother, grandmother, aunt, and my family from Mexico. My mother was the first to talk to me about my grandpa and what death was.

My mother was the first to explain what death was to me and really helped me with my problem with dealing with his death. The best way she put it was that it’s a moment in a person’s life where they are asked to leave earth and return back home. When my grandfather passed away, my mom really started to open up to me about his death and how she handled it. I was hurting inside and she knew it. She was trying to help me cope with the pain by telling stories. Her main thoughts were that he was a great leader and that’s what she mostly learned from him. She was also explain that he was the type of person that liked to care for others as if they were family, and I found that very intersecting, because as I started to grow up without him I would do the exact same thing. In a way I started to feel a bit better as time went by, because I now knew my grandfather lived an honest life. A year later I got the chance to travel to Mexico and got to really get to know him even better.

I first got off the car; I remember meeting all my family that lived around me in Mexico and the feeling that came over me was just out of this world. One day, I caught myself surrounded with a lot of my family in my living room. They were all drinking and talking with me and my family and then the topic of my grandfather came up. At first I didn’t want to talk about it, but I loved and respected him so much, I ended up changing my mind. Their main thoughts were for me to understand that my grandfather was the man he was, because he would get beat every day at home, sometimes for no reason, but he grew up into a very strong man that could handle anything that life threw at him from traveling to America with no money, just some skills to raising a family and keeping them together in America. They told me how they all knew that I was depressed about his loss. They saw it in my body language and explained that their stories were to help me feel better and see a different side of him. In a way they did help, because I was only 11 when he passed away. I never got the chance to hear stories come from him, built and hearing all theirs helped me feel like he never left. After that trip to Mexico some time pasted and on a rare sunny afternoon, I was just talking with my grandpa

My grandmother always tells me that she misses him so much, it breaks my heart into a million pieces to hear talk like that. She does talk to her daughters about him but not the way she does with me. She will start a simple sentence and the next minute she breaks down in tears when she gets serious about the discussion. She knew that I was still troubled by his lost. She explained to me that she did not know how I hid the pain but she wanted to help me feel better. Her way of helping emotionally was by telling stories, because she knew I love to hear about him. Once I heard these words, I felt love that I had never felt before and I think that’s what helped me live with his death. Up to this point in my life I have grown as a man and learned so much from the people that took the time to teach me the ways of understanding life itself and helping me deal with my problem with death.

What I took from these stories was that yes my grandfather was a great lose to us, I took it as the greatest lesson he could have taught me even in his death. That lesson was that we never know when it’s our time, so before we get called up we should always make every day like it’s our last. We should put 110% in every little thing in our daily lives from remembering little details to making someone smile on their worst day. That we should walk towards a life where you do not work so hard to be noticed but rather have your absence be felt everywhere. At a very young age

 I learned to never fear death, because when that happens, that’s when you never get to do everything you would like to do before your times up. It really took me a couple of years to finally be at peace with his death. Once I was, I saw a major change in my attitude towards people and change in my life. I learned to always be happy, even when the world is against you or when you lose someone very dear to your heart. I show that I can handle anything in life, because I know god would not put me to the test if he knew I could not overcome it. When I think about it I sort of adopted his personality, I looked at the world in a different angle, I understood things different

Throughout the years I have learned so much from and about my grandfather, it’s one of the main reasons I am able to face the world without fearing it. Sitting around will get you no where. He taught me to be a man that stood for honor and respect everywhere he went, no matter what kind of people I met or tried to get me to believe different. I miss my grandfather so much and I think about him every day and that’s what motivates me to be the best I can be at everything I attempt at, because I know he’s next to me, still pushing me to be the best. Now a days I work full time for a company Southland Sod farm and go to school at night and soon I will able to apply to transfer to the University of Humboldt. His memory keeps me going.