The parting of people is something nobody ever wants to happen in their lives. As many people have said it “everything happens for a reason.” Now that I am older, I can see things for what they really were when they happened, and I realize now that there isn’t a way to know what is to come, its just life, and nothing else. Life is a soulless thing. It brings the best things into this world only to then soon take them away. The best things in life always come to an end; while it seems like the worst things will last for eternity.

Tick. Tock. No one really knew the significance to this, but it represented the time passing until the end. No one in my family knew he had it at the time either, that wretched thing, the disease that would end up killing him slowly over the course of two years. When I think back on it, the thought that he was put on this earth simply just to suffer comes across my mind. Was it for a purpose? Or is that just how life is? A thing that just put us all here for no reason. I like to think there is one, a purpose, just to keep me sane, but sometimes even that gets to me when I think of all of the evil things life has done to me.

Tick tock. His condition only worsened over time but I never knew that. He used to be so happy. Always smiling, he always brought me happiness every time I saw Him. He would have my favorite food with him every time he came home, every Saturday morning. Gradually though, that all began to stop. One thing would stop, I would move on, and then another, and another. His smile slowly drooped down, not into a frown, but flat. To me, that was worse he didn’t look happy to me and I knew he wasn’t. He would never be again.

It pained me to see him like that, especially near the end. The sickness tightened its grip on him during the final months. He was soon bed ridden. He could not stand, he could not walk. The life that used to be in his eyes and face faded away until he had the expression on his face that he had given up.

The deterioration of his health escalated. His six foot two frame began to shrink, as he became skinny, frail, something several months earlier no one could ever see him as.

Tick Tock. My mom and grandma were soon always at his side. I did not recognize it at the time, but for them and him, the end was near. His suffering would come to an end, and he would be better, just not with us.

Boom. Something went off inside of me when it happened. I was in shock at first I didn’t know how to explain it. I just sat there in shock, looking blankly at him. Nurses and doctors rushed as I was ripped away from his side as I started hysterically crying all the while the heart monitor falt-lining. I remember his face when it happened; his eyes widened and darted around, panicked. The look on his face was of fear and his hands’ grip tightened on my mom’s. Silence fell on the room eerily as a tear dropped from his eye. He looked at us and calmed down, he had accepted it, he was going to be better soon. The worst part of it all was that I was the last person his dying eyes ever saw, the last person he looked in the eyes.

To this day I wonder how it would be if my grandpa were still alive, how much of an influence he would have in my life. But I realize that thinking like that only holds someone back from thinking and relying on not what the present and future have to offer, but pain of the past. Life is life and we can’t stop that. Although I was young, I had a special connection to him, something I do not think I’ll ever forget. Why it was taken away from me; I’ll never know, but what I do know is that it is just how things are in this world. Why do all good things always come to end? Well in life you, have to think of it as this; what flowers do you pick out of the garden? The most beautiful ones.