Life truly is a magical thing – and by magical, I mean completely cryptic, uncanny and inconceivable. That’s the true definition of magic. In fact, the most astonishing aspect of life to me is how quickly it can all go away. Poof. In one blink. Life doesn’t wait until you’ve written your will or have said your goodbyes. It just goes on spinning on its axis because that’s just how magical it is. This blog is less for my readers, and more so for me as a way to finally close a chapter in my life that’s been haunting me for about two years. If you’re still reading this, I promise you it may get a bit emotional.

The other day at work, I got a call that Gary’s father had a heart attack. He’s doing fine now, so that’s not where this story is heading. Ironically, the day before, Gary and I had a conversation about his relationship with his father – or, lack thereof. Per usual, he threw out what we all do – “a phone works two ways”. I mean, he wasn’t wrong, but I told him that I didn’t want his relationship with his dad to be like what had happened between my grandfather and I. I had been meaning to call him, life happened and I didn’t. The next day, he died. Just like that. The magical will of life just came about and took my grandfather…

In an episode of Grey’s Anatomy I was watching early today, Dr. Maggie Pierce – who had recently lost her mother to inflammatory breast cancer – performed fetal heart surgery and removed a tumor from the fetus’ heart and placing a shunt to allow the heart to beat more effectively. As they were closing the heart, the fetus started to go into cardiac arrest. As the chief of cardiothoracic surgery, everyone turned to Maggie for next steps and she stood there frozen in time. They asked what they should do and she replied, “nothing”. When asked why, Maggie explained that all the fetus’ heart knew was that tumor, so of course it’s going to freak out without it being there. She wanted to give the heart a second to “calm down” and learn to beat on its own without the presence of the tumor. Needless to say, the fetus survived the surgery.

For as long as I could remember, I could never cope well with preparation of loss. That’s because you could never prepare to lose someone. I knew for about three months that my grandfather was really sick, but I’ve always known my grandfather as the cheerful man that took my cousin and I to church on Sundays, made me laugh and wore very nice suits. I didn’t want to distort that image with new frames of him skinnier than usual and coughing up his left lung. Nope, I wanted to freeze time and let that memory of him live on. My dad had been encouraging me for months to go see my grandfather and I always said I would, but I never did. Not because I couldn’t because I very well could have, but I didn’t want to see my grandfather like that. I was the same way with my uncle and my great grandmother. All of who never did anything to hurt me or wanted me to shut them out; I just could not allow myself to ruin a picture perfect image. It’s all I had left.

My dad called me around 7:00 on February 24th, 2018. I’m pretty sure he assumed I was home by then, which I should have been, but I remembered I was working late to hit my meetings goal at my then-place of employment. I could hear it in his voice that something wasn’t right. I asked him what was wrong and then he told me that he’d rather me be home. I was only three blocks away from home, so whatever news he had to tell me in three blocks could’ve just been broken to me then. That’s when my world just stopped. He told me, I weeped, I hung up, then I stopped. I walked home, but it’s almost like my body was just on autopilot. I was walking, but I wasn’t conscious of the fact that I was doing it. The moment I got in, my dad was on the phone with my mom and my mom had her arms open and waiting for me. I fell weak, like I was breathing, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t speak, I didn’t want to eat, I couldn’t even make sense of what was going on and if it was even real.

For the past two years, I had felt this guilt about not being able to say goodbye to someone who I knew loved me unconditionally, even if at times he may have felt like I didn’t reciprocate. I didn’t reach out. I didn’t check in. I didn’t text. I didn’t even ask how he was doing because I knew it wasn’t good and I didn’t want to hear it. This is my open letter to myself, and whoever got this far in the blog, to know that life is a magical, cryptic, uncanny, astonishing thing. Make sure to make the most of it with the people you love and make time for those you care about before time gets stripped from you before you could even check your watch.