Festivals and Funerals

This month I lost my grandfather.

Last year at the same time, I lost my grandmother.

Two Augusts. Both times I wasn’t there.

The worst part of losing someone when you live abroad is not the grief.

It’s that you start asking whether you are even doing the right thing. Living here, this far from your family. Not being there for the good things or the bad ones. I mean festivals and funerals.

I asked myself that question so many times this month.

I still don’t have an answer.

I don’t even know what my relationship with my grandfather was.

All I remember is a strict man.

He lost his mother when he was two years old. He grew up with a stepmother and three stepbrothers, and they made sure he never forgot what he was in that house.

I never used to see it that way. All I saw was the strictness. The opinions. The distance between him and us that neither side crossed.

Now I get it.

That life made him hard. That life taught him to be strict. It was so hard on him that there was no space left for anything soft.

But he never gave up. Never.

A man who didn’t finish a single year of school, and today there is a school in my village with his name on it. That’s the legacy he left behind.

I look up to him for that. I always will.

I just wish he could have been a little softer. With us. With himself.

I wish we had more time. I wish we didn’t have the differences we had.

I’m grateful. For the comfort I grew up in, which he paid for with a life much harder than mine. For the legacy. For the school with his name on it.

I know how hard he worked. I know how hard it must have been.

So I hope wherever he is now, he’s at peace. And a little soft with himself, finally.

And I feel this DNA in me. I find myself a lot like him sometimes.