Learning to make Time

The gray and black stubbles on my grandfather’s face always scratched my face whenever he hugged me. My grandfather was pretty young in my eyes, but of course as a child I always looked up to him, since he was the only one that acted as a father figure in my house. My grandfather and me would always go and work on the car after I was done my homework. He always called me his “Monstro,” (cute monster). I remember when my grandfather and I went to an amusement park together and we had the best time we would ever have in our lives. Then one day, he started to become more obsessed with alcohol, and he could not stop until he became alcoholic. This changed my whole perspective of my grandfather. The alcoholism was something that separated me from him and made me realize that nothing in life is permanent. But this incident did not change my time spent with him. His happy, wrinkled smile grew subtler and less frequent. The alcohol began to take a great toll on his life, and began to become his drug addiction. He would do anything to get alcohol and hide it. One time, I woke up early in the morning to go to school one day, and I went to put on some socks and found a bottle of vodka. When my grandfather saw that I found it, he told me not to tell my parents and to put it back. This marked the beginning of his transformation and the loss of my “old” grandfather. This was the grandfather that I was forced to live with and cope with. We still had some good times, but most of the time was his drinking time, which forced us to throw him out of our apartment. A couple years later, we moved to Pennsylvania and settled into a home. My grandfather stayed with my grandmother at her house, and at his son’s house. One day we received a phone call saying that he was bleeding out his mouth. When we all went to the house we forced him to go to the hospital due to his bad condition. They said his liver had burst and he was bleeding internally. As a result, his body was bloating and getting full of blood, and was in a coma. I left the hospital fearful of his impending death. After a few days, I went to visit him and I talked to him and told him that I loved him and that he should not leave me. One day after, there was a phone call for me from my grandmother saying that at 6:30am, on September the 18th, my grandfather had died. My life was not the same that day. Even though I was going through a tragic moment, I learned to believe that you will never know what you have in your life until you lose it. So it is important to treasure every moment with everyone.