When I was 13 years old, my grandfather died of dementia. My early childhood years were full of frequent visits to the nursing home where he lived, which slowly increased in number as the years passed. It had always been in the back of our minds that our time with him wouldn’t last forever, but in the end, that knowledge didn’t make the loss any less worse. Truthfully, I didn’t spend enough time with him […]
My grandfather died of pneumonia when I was 16. In the years before my grandfather’s death, aging slowly robbed him of his health, his strength, his happiness, and his dignity. He exists in my memories, through vicarious stories, as the strong hero who persevered through unspeakable adversity during the Communist Revolution. Who sacrificed much in order to immigrate to Canada. But he also exists in my memories more directly as as a quiet, frail, old […]