My Grandfather

My grandfather died 13 years ago yesterday. The more time passes the more I regret not getting to know him. He was the first in my more immediate family to die, so I guess the blow came a little harder but its been a while, but than again I never really knew him.

I visited his grave when I was in Romania. He was buried on a hillside. I wasn't sure exactly where he was buried, but I bought some orange flowers and walked to the grave. I realized that that was my first time ever having visited a grave. What flowers are appropriate? Orange? somehow they seemed strangely appropriate. I walked in the snow amongst the graves for an hour. Somebody there helped me look but he didn't find it either. As I was almost ready to give up on the last climb down I stumbled across it. I cleaned it off a bit though took the ld flowers to through out. I didn't have any candles or anything else. There where some bottles of water, I don't know why they were there. I don't really understand why people have graves It most certainly isn't for the living. Perhaps when they are alive they feel comforted by thought thought that their memory will be reduced to a gaudy monument in a century. My grandfather didn't want to be buried, to be eaten by worms. The things that sustain your memory are the little thing that reverberate through the rest of time. If you leave this world a better or a worse place in the end it only matters to you when you go to sleep and die.

I was taken to a friend's house the night my grandfather died. It was one of the few nights of my childhood that I remember. Strangely enough the only thing about that night I do not remember his him.

As people go my grandfather was a great one. If there was any person in my family worth looking up to he is undoubtedly the one. I am not sure how much I know him is fact and how much is fiction, but the one thing I remember him a little. He was a calm, classy, and always seemed confident in himself, even through the months of chemo.