Tears gathered in my eyes, my heart was pounding, I sat there waiting to hear what my Dad was about to say. Curious, I waited for the words to come out of his mouth. It was almost as if I wanted to stoop time, just to take it all in. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! I replayed it over and over again in my head, how much of an impact this was going to make on our family from now on.

My Grandpa has always been someone that I have looked up to, and admired for my whole life. Losing him would mean losing the person I admired the most. I wish I could go back to the moment before we got the dreadful news about my Grandpa being diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. He seemed to be responding well to treatment when he had what the doctors first thought was a reaction to a medication. It turned out to be much more than that. They rushed him to the hospital and my Grandma gave us updates throughout the week. The news was getting worse, and doctors just hope for the best. My Mom and aunt knew it wasn’t going to be good, so they drove up to Montreal to be with him and my Grandma.


I go really nervous when my Mom left, so I tried to remember all of the great times I had with him. The first thing that came to my mind was when we all went to Quebec City (where my Grandpa grew up) as a family, the summer before. I got to spend so much time with him. One night, Grandpa, my Dad and I went for a walk after dinner just to catch up on everything. If it weren’t for that walk, I would have never known as many things about him that I now do. He has done so many things for other people. He doesn’t deserve to be going through all of this. That was running through my head the whole time we were on that walk, besides listening to all the amazing stories he had to tell me and my dad.


Once my Grandpa realized that he could no longer work at the pediatric practice that he had started 45 years earlier, he was crushed, although he was still able to work at a local clinic for far fewer hours. While working at the clinic, he did something that he wasn’t sure he could still do. He had been questioning himself as a doctor, due to the fatigue, and sickness, when he was able to diagnose a newborn baby with a life threatening disease. Meningitis. It turned out that that was only 3 weeks before he died.


Everyone comes to an end in the road, but it came too soon for my Grandpa. He lived 8 months after being diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, and was only 72 years old. He had a very full life and had a family who loved him very much. Just like anything good in life you always want more of a good thing, and I wish we could have had more of him, but I feel very lucky to have had him for as long as we did. It has been a year now, and I still think about him every single day, and will miss him forever.