Curtains hung in the window. They were lace and once white, but years of exposure to cigarette smoke had left them heavy and yellowed. Although their appearance had faltered, the general purpose was still the same. Slivers of sunlight peeked through the holes of the lace and danced on the wood panels of the home, my grandparents’ house. The beams of light ebbed near the brown shag carpet. Smoke was a common guest in its fibers as well. Over the years of my grandparents smoking, the toxic odor could be found in nearly everything in the house — furniture, clothing, hair, skin. However, one object had not yet been accustomed to the smoke — a new, stark white cot, foreign to the muted and stained colors of the rest of the home.

The cot was present on one Saturday morning in April 2005, and so was I on a visit to see my grandparents. With me, I had brought a book, an anthology of stories that my elementary school was giving away at no cost. Apparently, the book had overextended its welcome in the school library, but it had just begun its stay in mine. Most of the books I owned were hand-me-down copies, the ones that no one else wanted anymore. Still, some of my favorite stories I read in the pages of these secondhand paperbacks littering my bookshelf.

One of those favorite stories was in the book I had brought along that day. It was a short story called Strega Nona. Each page was illustrated with folksy drawings of an Italian woman, her town, and her magic pasta pot. I’d seen the illustrations and read through the story itself countless times, but I didn’t bring the book along to read alone again. Instead, I had brought it to read to one person in particular.

Perhaps others listened to the story as I read it. I wasn’t alone on my visit. Inside the house was my mother, my aunt, my grandma, my grandpa, and a woman visiting to talk to my grandma about certain matters. The woman and my grandma sat in the kitchen at the dining table to talk, far away from me in the living room. Two other guests came to visit a bit later, an older couple with whom my mom was church friends. But the only person I truly wanted to hear the story was my grandpa.

I sat on a hard wooden chair I had swiped from the table and placed beside the cot. On the cot lie my grandpa. And on a Saturday morning when other seven-year-olds were off playing outside or with friends, I was right where I wanted to be: reading a book beside my grandpa.

Before that day, I was always beside my grandpa in some fashion. It is canon that someone’s mother be the person they adore most in the world. So, if my mother was the first person I loved, then my grandpa was the close second. I like to think my grandpa felt the same way about me. After all, he did have a nickname for me: Schluss. It was affectionate and German, straight back to our roots. And I had a nickname for him: Pappy. Less thought-out, but nevertheless meaningful.

As I read from my book to Pappy on that April morning, he didn’t talk much. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy my reading, because he did. Pappy didn’t talk much because at that moment, he physically couldn’t.

But Pappy used to talk a lot. When he would drink coffee loaded with lots of milk and sugar, he would talk. “Schluss,” he would start. “Go get some Oreos from the kitchen.” I would leave from the couch where Pappy could always be found and go grab the box. Bringing it back, we would each grab a few. Then, we would dip the cookies into the mug of coffee until they were soaked through with caffeinated goodness. It had always been delicious to me, right up until the moment that my dad told me caffeine was a drug while we all sat around my grandparents’ kitchen table. From then, the tradition was a little less naive.

Still, my grandpa had other quirks. Every night he would watch Jeopardy on cable. Whenever I would watch alongside him, I was always impressed with how he could rattle off answers to clues. Sports were his specialty. Pappy learned sports trivia from being an avid spectator of sporting games, but he learned all his other trivia probably primarily from the crossword puzzles he completed daily. Seated at his same worn spot on the couch, Pappy held a pen in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Sometimes if a difficult word came up in a clue, Pappy would ask me to fetch the dictionary. I would go pull it from its place in a coffee table drawer. First taking care to cautiously open the worn book held together tenuously by a duct tape binding, I would then delicately flip through the thin pages until I found the word. I didn’t need to search many words for Pappy though. He could mainly finish the puzzles alone. Still, I will never forget the day that Pappy called the house to ask for help on a clue about one of my favorite kids shows. For a man who knew all the answers in a row of Jeopardy clues, his granddaughter could still help him figure out what, as I thought, was an easy clue. I felt special.

Reading the book to my grandpa on that Saturday morning in April, I felt special again. I was with my grandpa, and giving him comfort. As I read, I almost felt in another world from the rest of the house. My grandma sat at the table in the kitchen to talk to the woman there on business. The dialogue was muted, and my back was towards them. They were miles away. On that day, I read only to my grandpa, but the words fell on weary ears, the pictures on tired eyes. My grandpa, as he lie on the cot that day, was an exhausted man.

In the beginning of my junior year of high school, I researched bone cancer for a major health project. Bone cancer is rare. Perhaps that’s why my grandfather was diagnosed. After all, he was special to me, one of a kind. What is more special than for a person to receive a rare form of cancer?

But while the man dealing with the cancer was certainly special, the cancer itself was not. It was an unwanted visitor, a heinous houseguest. Yet, perhaps it had felt welcomed.

Health professionals recommend abstaining from tobacco and alcohol in order to prevent bone cancer. Yet from an early age, my grandpa immersed himself in an atmosphere of Camel cigarettes and Schmidt’s beer. My mom called the beer “Rotgut”, a tribute to the disgusting feel it left in the stomach. But my grandpa, like his dad before him, let the beer consume his life. Just as the smoke overtook the frame and structure of the home in which my grandparents lived, the smoke of many a cigarette penetrated the bones of my grandfather and the alcohol of many a cold beer replaced their marrow. The habits consumed him completely, just as they continuously threaten to consume others.

Alcohol is terrible. It’s damaging, offensive, crude, crass — yet it’s fun, a crowd pleaser weaseling its way into the hands of high schoolers, including some of my closest friends. A party is never complete without a couple red Solo cups and a fancy bottle of  liquor swiped from a parent’s loosely-guarded alcohol shelf. And for those attending the party, drinking is ceremonious, an induction into an inner society. To gain entry, one must drink. The teenager must feel the burn of alcohol pour down their throat and diffuse into the bloodstream. To not drink, one labels themselves as a prude, a goody-good student above the rest. A nondrinker cannot be in the society of cool friends. Maybe to my friends that feel comfortable mixing a shot of vodka with Mountain Dew, alcohol is simply a ploy to popularity. But to me, it’s so much more. And as I sit with a red cup filled to the brim with water at a party, surrounded by friends making fools of themselves by drinking hard knocks of whiskey straight from the bottle, I am transported back to a single year of my life once again.

My grandpa was struggling throughout that year. The television wasn’t tuned in to Jeopardy every night. Newspapers were thrown away, crosswords left unfinished. Pappy was in the hospital, and feeling the painful consequences of his past — a lifetime of throwing back more than a few beers in one day. A liver problem, the doctors commented, in addition to a myriad of other health issues. No cancer. The doctors treated the problems as necessary. The issues should have cleared up. But they got worse.

The pain continued. Finally, my grandpa left the doctors at York Hospital behind and went for a second opinion at Memorial. He was diagnosed instantly. Cancer. But it was too late.

Years of smoking and alcoholism had caught up. Visits to my grandparents’ house were no longer characterized by cookies and coffee and crosswords. On the couch where Pappy always sat, a large indent was clearly visible. Even the furniture missed his company. Pappy lied in the downstairs bedroom of my grandparents’ house, the room where I kept all my toys. Surrounded by pink dollhouses and princess Barbies, the pain rose by the minute. As the cancer grew more, my grandpa’s health and quality of life grew less. Pappy lost the ability to speak, save for one experience. Lying on his cot with my grandma in the room, Pappy looked at a picture of me and spoke. “Schluss.”

Because my grandpa couldn’t talk, I picked up the slack, reading stories from books and telling him my own. On that Saturday morning, I closed the anthology after finishing the last story. It was perfect timing; Pappy needed to take his medicine anyway.

My mom grabbed the bottle of medicine from the kitchen. I heard a drawer open, and pieces of silverware clinked against each other as she dug out a spoon. My grandma and the woman there to discuss plans for my grandpa maintained a constant conversation in the kitchen, their dialogue mere background noise. I stood beside my grandpa, ready to help as my mom returned to the living room, handing the medicine and spoon off to my aunt. Holding the silver spoon steady, my aunt carefully poured the proper dosage of purple liquid into the small bowl. Keeping it level, she approached my grandpa’s mouth. He wouldn’t open. “Come on, Dad,” my aunt said. “Don’t be difficult.” She laughed, and so did I. It was funny that my grandpa would rebel even when he was sick. A final act of defiance to the world. Then, realization. It hit my aunt first, or maybe my mom. Around the same time, the looks of slight happiness on their faces changed instantly to shock, panic, pain. I realized right away too. My eyes widened. I couldn’t breathe. A giant rock sat in the base of my throat, blocking all air from filling my lungs. I stood in place, stoic. I was a tree with my roots planted deeply in the soil of the brown shag carpet while a raging wildfire blazed on all sides. I took in the sight before me. My grandpa. He lie there, still, motionless, becoming a blurred vision as hot tears pooled in my eyes. Around me, everyone rushed about. The two friends from church jumped from their seats on the couch. From the kitchen, my grandma and the woman hurried to the cot. I felt hands on my shoulders, tearing my roots from the ground to move me. I couldn’t move on my own. I couldn’t even think. A million thoughts ran through my mind, but I could focus on only one. Pappy’s gone. I didn’t put up a fight as the woman grabbed my arm and pulled me outside. The birds sang joyfully, the air smelled sickly sweet, the sun shone too bright. She sat me down in a puffy, overly comfortable porch seat, a hard contrast to the wooden chair beside Pappy’s cot.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” she said. “It’s fine.”

No, wrong. She was lying. Why was she lying?

“I saw you reading to your grandpa. That was nice. Do you like to read?”

I felt like a marionette doll tied to strings. A hand controlled me, forced my head to bob up and down. Tears, the only sign I was actually myself, streamed down my face. I didn’t want to talk about books, nothing was fine, she was a liar, I didn’t want to be outside — my grandpa was dead. I wanted to be inside. I should have been inside. Everyone else was inside, even people who weren’t related to Pappy at all. Yet there I sat, on the porch of the home, separated from my world by walls and doors and windows framed with yellowed lace curtains. The woman continued to talk to me, trying to get a response. Perhaps she thought avoiding what had just happened in the house was the best plan of action. But she was wrong in every way. On the outside, I may have just appeared as a kid incapable of understanding the capacity of what had happened inside. But years of studies worked against her. Gifted kids, as I was, have increased cognition and comprehension of death. I knew what had happened, and dancing around the subject was just making it worse. Studies also show that avoiding talking about death to kids increases anxiety, and in that moment, that was apparent. I was an emotional hurricane. My head swirled with vicious winds. I grew more anxious by the minute. Fear, anger, pain — all my bitter sentiments flooded my interior, fighting to be expressed on the outside. In the end, pain won. All that emerged was tears and sobs.

From the porch I could hear my family inside crying as well. The church couple comforted my family as best they could, confronting the issue at hand. Yet I was stuck with a woman foreign to me, separated from my grandpa and my family by a single white door. Instead of being by Pappy’s side in death as I was in life, I was surrounded by cheerful bird songs overpowered by my sobs, bright sunlight harshly reflecting the tears in my eyes, and a woman asking me questions I did not wish to answer.

“It’s okay. Don’t you want to talk?”

The scene of my grandpa’s death replayed in my mind. Had it truly happened? I almost didn’t believe it. The first step of the grieving process: denial. No longer could I visit the house I had grown to love and hear a familiar nickname, Schluss. No longer would I receive a phone call to help out the smartest man I knew with a crossword puzzle. No longer would that man ask me to look up a word for him in a worn-out dictionary on an even tougher clue. It simply wasn’t possible that these simple pleasures would be forgotten memories. And maybe, they didn’t have to be. The second stage of grieving, a stage characterized by guilt, fear, anxiety, and emotions accompanied by words and thoughts a person does not normally express. Such thoughts circled my skull. Perhaps this woman, by pulling me out of the room, had limited my ability to help. I could have done something. I could have saved Pappy. If only I would have known what was wrong earlier in the day. If only, instead of focusing on my stupid stories for hours, I had looked a little closer at Pappy. But it wasn’t all my fault. Who even was this woman? Why was she in the house? I thought back to her introduction earlier that day. She was a from a hospice, there to make life more comfortable for my grandpa. By shoving a cocktail of painkillers and medicine down the throats of her patients, she made the rest of their lives easier and better. By being there, she marked that not much time was left. And there it was. It clicked. She was the reason he left. She was bad karma, a negative omen. Not even that, she was completely oblivious. Maybe she could comfort those full of death, but she was terrible in comforting those full of life. I wasn’t stupid. My grandpa was dead and I knew it. He died right in front of me, a vision seared into my temporal lobe like Death himself had taken a branding iron and burned the image to memory. I was yet another cattle in his herd, walking the world with the unbearable burden of pain on my weak shoulders. The woman continued to assure me that everything would be okay, but I knew that was impossible. Pappy wouldn’t be okay. And neither would I.

I’m still not okay. It’s been a decade since that day, and I still have flashbacks of pain. Relics of my grandpa live on. I am surrounded by them. The only dictionary in my home is red, a Webster’s New World college edition bound by gray duct tape. Hundreds of crosswords lie around my room and litter my desk. They are mostly unfinished; I’m missing the clues about sports. I watch Jeopardy every night, and whenever I sweep a category, my parents comment. “I think you could probably even beat your grandpa.” I smile, but there’s that uncertainty. That pause, and the insertion of “think”. I can never know how proud my grandpa would be as he sees me grow up. I can never sit on a couch at his house and play Jeopardy beside him, a mug of coffee and cookies filling our hands. I can never call him to ask for sports trivia, or help him with his own crosswords. And I can never hear that nickname, Schluss.

Society calls grief a process. The end stage requires a person to finally come to terms with the loss and move on. In American culture, a person is expected to finish grieving in a few months, a year, two at the most. This concept is useless, pointless, and misguided. Grief knows no time. Even years after my grandpa’s death, wounds are still fresh. Sadness still consumes the memories I keep of my grandpa, a void in my heart remains unfilled. For when a person truly loves someone, there is no moving on. There is only memory. Memory of times shared, memory of grief, memory of pain, memory of death, memory of everything. For when a person dies, only one thing lives on. Memory. So, perhaps there is a grieving process. Maybe it does exist for some people. But if the process exists in the case of my grandpa, then it knows no end. For in grief, in the memory and moments of the past — in his death — my grandfather lives.