Remembering My Father, Honoring the Memories of a Family Member

Translated…

Remembering this time last year, I’d taken your young granddaughter to pick you up at the station, and then, we went for some steamy, beef noodles, you’d kept commending how your baby granddaughter is more and more beautiful, more and more better behaved, and, we were all, immersed, in the loving moment of sharing the time together.

And still, just how the sun sets in the west and the moon rises, this sort of a beautiful interaction will eventually, come to an end one day, I’d recalled how we were once, the best pals in watching those foreign films together, you had an amazing memory with the English vocabulary words, gotten very high grades.

not my photograph…

Seeing the photographs, from when my daughter was born, the times we’d gone out to travel, savored an assortment of delicious foods. You’d said to me, “You must live happily, and once it’s time for you to leave, you must also, leave, without any regrets.” That optimism of yours, is the best present you’d left for me and my child.

I’d flipped open the pages of the textbooks from community college, it was, very, aromatic, and the words I’d read using my fingers, so very real too, without knowing, that being back in school, after holding the bottles, and changing the smelly diapers, is such an amazing thing for me, especially the classes made me have many expectations, it also had some healing properties too, helping us, forget the sorrows from the losses.

When your baby granddaughter got a bit older, I’d taken her to story, exercise, and clay classes; waited until she was in the elementary years, I’d gotten more time to myself to learn, “Mom, you have teachers too?”, every time she’d asked me with that naïve of a child, I’d felt, that learning alongside my daughter, in our different areas is an amazing feat. We’d had reading times together, and, as I’d found a place to stop, I’d told her, that her grandpa didn’t take up the computer until he was in his seventies, so she could understand what it meant, to never stop learning as you get older.

not my picture…

And although, your baby granddaughter can only miss you in sorting through those photographs, but, the spirit of being readers will keep on, getting passed down, from one generation to the next, and the extensions of having good character and the love for learning is also, passed down, we will all, march happily onward, on this path of life without you now.

And so, there is, NO better way to honor someone you’d lost that putting the individual’s values into your everyday life, like this woman had done. She’d carried her father’s spirit after he had died, and passed on the love of learning to her own child too, and this, is a great way, of keeping someone’s memories alive, and, so long as you’re able to keep a part of someone with you, then, the person you’d lost isn’t really dead.