There are people who never truly leave our hearts.
My grandfather is one of those people for me.
He was the person who made me feel seen, loved, and safe. The one who made me feel I had a place in this world.
Today marks thirteen years since he died.
Thirteen years. Long enough for people to assume it doesn’t hurt the same anymore.
But the deepest grief is never measured in years.
When he died, I lost part of what I called home. I lost a witness to my life. I lost the person I would have returned to a thousand times since then, only to discover there was nowhere left to go.
I miss him in every important moment, but also in the quiet spaces between them.
I wish he had been there when I became a mother, when I suffered, when I succeeded, every time I stood before the sea, every time I longed to feel loved without having to earn it.
I remember the moment I found out he had died as if it happened today.
I was at work, teaching my preschool class.
During lunch break, I stepped into a small room between two classrooms and checked my phone. I had a message from my sister-in-law:
“I think you should know… Grandpa passed away this morning at seven.”
I was still standing, but inside, I felt my whole being collapse to the floor.
I put my hand over my heart, sat down, and stared into nothing until another teacher came to tell me that lunch break had ended quite a while ago.
Only when I saw her did I finally cry.
I realized something inside me had changed forever.
I would never again be the person I had been just moments before.
The version of me that had existed in connection with him died alongside him.
And I had to let her rest every time I felt tempted to bring her back to life.
I had to grieve her, too.
Not only him.
Reality had changed five hours before I learned that it had changed.
For five hours, I lived as though nothing had happened.
I laughed with the children.
I played.
I believed that the heart that loved me most in the world was still beating.
I was furious.
I felt guilty.
I felt utterly powerless.
How dare the world keep turning as if nothing had happened?
How could I have laughed without knowing that the man I loved so deeply had already died?
For years, I kept returning to those five hours.
I thought of them as a room where a door between two worlds still stood open.
In one of them, my grandfather was alive.
In the other, he wasn’t.
And somehow I crossed from one world into the other without realizing it.
There was no way back.
If I had been given the choice, would I have wanted one more day untouched by the irreversible pain of loss?
If I had children, would I give them one more carefree day in a world still whole, knowing that one painful truth would change their lives forever?
I don’t know.
Maybe I couldn’t have stopped the truth from arriving.
But perhaps I could have delayed it just a little longer.
Those five hours taught me how precious innocence is.
We lose it before we even realize we have it.
Grief began the moment the truth entered my body and settled there.
The moment I understood that from then on, I would have to learn to live in a new world, one where something essential was missing.
But what do you do with grief?
How do you live with it?
You wear black for forty days.
And then what?
Do you simply take grief off with your mourning clothes?
How do you accept it?
How do you close a chapter that can never truly be closed?
How do you keep living?
No one teaches us.
I’ve carried it with me ever since.
In the way I love.
In the way I hold my children.
Every time I look at the sea and pause, wishing he were there, or at least that he could see it through my eyes.
Whenever I search for safety, I find myself discovering it in the memory of him.
Today I went to the seaside and bought myself a glass bottle of Pepsi, just as he used to buy me every summer when he took me to the coast as a little girl.
After thirteen years, I am no longer the woman I was when he died.
I’ve lived an entire lifetime since then.
I’ve lost and I’ve gained.
I’ve fallen and I’ve stood up again.
I’ve broken apart and rebuilt myself more times than I can count.
And yet, there is still a part of me that is simply his granddaughter.
A part that still hopes to find his address, written in carpenter’s pencil on a torn scrap of paper.
I think that part of me will remain until the end of my life.
Grief has taught me that love does not end when life does.
It simply changes its form.
Today I think about the privilege of having been loved by him.
I still talk to him.
And I celebrate the fact that, after thirteen years, I still miss him.
His absence still hurts.
That says everything about who he was in my life.
Perhaps longing, like grief, is simply the way love keeps breathing after the person we loved no longer can.
That love still exists.
Just as deeply.
It simply no longer has a place to go.
So it makes its home inside me.
I let it hurt.
And I let it transform me.