"I'm going to my grandparents house this weekend....." - those words are all it takes to shut my mouth and close me off from the rest of the conversation.  I haven't said those words in over two years, and I will never say them again.  It never occurred to me, though, growing up, that I would find myself in such a situation, a situation where mere words could sever me from the conversation at hand just as a knife would - cold, sharp, and to the point.  I began to lose the right and ability to say such words five and a half years ago, in April of my fourth grade year in 2009.  That month my grandfather died suddenly, all in the span of one, life changing day.  I remember being woken up in the middle of the night to my father's face peeking over the edge of the bunkbed on which I slept.  He told me we needed to go to the hospital and I was too young and too inexperienced in the ways of the world to realize just how serious the situation must have been to be worthy of a trip the hospital in the middle of the night.  I can still see the pale, white light of the emergency room, and the motionless figure of my unresponsive grandfather as my family stood around him.   I can hear the soft voice of the aged priest who came to administer my grandfather's Last Rites.  Fast forward two and a half years and it happened again.  November 2011, my grandmother, who had just spoken to my older brother and mother earlier that day, has just been found unresponsive and not breathing by my grandfather.  After rushing down the empty highway to the hospital in San Diego late that night, we discovered there was nothing we could do and that it was the result of a heart attack .  Being only thirteen years old and in the sixth grade, there was not much I could do the comfort the frail, shell-shocked remnant of my grandfather, who had just lost his wife of fifty years.  My grandfather would never fully recover from this loss, and in December of 2012, I lost him, my last grandfather.  I still visualize the mindblowing and exponentially fast decay of his strength as the cancer no one knew he had sucked the life out of his already weak, decrepit body.  Everyone had mistaken his continual weight loss to his insufficient eating.  The long and inefficient process of getting his dentures had made eating a steep mountain to climb multiple times every single day.   He died on a Saturday night, but no one in my family could even possibly foresee what was to come next, even in their darkest of nightmares.  Just days after this tragic blow, my final remaining grandmother would pass away that very week in December 2012.  Myself, being only fourteen, was absolutely sure that something so crushing, so devastating could simply not happen so soon after an event of equal cataclysm; however, I knew something was wrong.  The biggest clue, the clue that created my sense of trepidation and foreshadowed the unveiling of bad news, was my father's early return from a conference I knew he was not supposed to arrive home from for at least another day.  This confusion and my natural curiousity set the wheels of my mind spinning.  Just days later I was riding in the car with my sister and both my parents.  Displeasing to my thirst for knowledge, my mother would not tell me where we were headed to, which was not customary.  Once again I felt something was amiss, and some source of inspiration I cannot place compelled me to test my parents.  I asked them if we could invite grandma over for dinner.  The response - evasion.  I persisted - more evasion.  It was as though the more the answer sought to hide from me, the more obvious it became.  Our journey ended at a mortuary, where my parents would once again be the bearers of bad news.  My sense of foreboding had been spot on, but I still could not believe it.  That was it.  All it took was three and a half years for all four of my grandparents to depart this life.  I am grateful I got to know them, especially as I have cousins who are too young to have memories of their grandparents, but I regret not being able to share certain things with them that I could only appreciate as an older person, such as high school sports, or discussing my grandfather's military career with him at an age in which I would treasure those stories. Yet it was not to be.  So three and a half years was all it took for me to completely lose the ability to say I was going to see my grandparents, and only after I had lost that privelige, would I realize just how much I had prized it and taken it for granted.  Now I am the friend I always pitied, the friend who did not have any remaining grandparents and could not share in new stories with regards to such things.  So in three and a half short years, I found myself completely and utterly disconnected from those who still have that which I so desperately desire - their grandparents.