Ever since I was four years old my family and I have had a group of friends that we have considered family.  In this family, I have met and gotten close to many people but one person definitely stood out to me. When I first met him in 2004 I wasn’t aware that I would end up being best friends with his daughter and him becoming part of my family. When he was part of my life, I don’t think I was entirely aware how important he was to my everyday life. On a fateful day in November, my parents and I heard the tragic news that he had passed away, and although it was one of the toughest days of my life, it was one I could never forget. After this day, so many things changed, including me. I bonded with people who I have known but never really known. Now they are people I see almost weekly and are like siblings to me.

Now to understand the importance of this man, you need to know what kind of person that he was. When you scroll through Facebook or Instagram and see those videos about the man who helped an injured cat out of a tree, he was the man who would stop everything to help who ever needed it. If you were a stranger he met on the street, the stranger and him would become fast friends and they would go out to brunch a week later. There wasn’t anyone that disliked him for any rational reason. He was a person you needed in your life and without him everything seems a little incomplete. The biggest impact he had on me was the day he died, and this is the story of the day I found out and I never expected it. Let me explain one more thing about this man. Six months before he died he was diagnosed with cancer. At first it was  not very serious and everyone believed that he would be fine. No one even knew the seriousness of his sickness until a month before he passed away. Towards the end he got better than got drastically worse. Most of his organs went into failure and he had developed tumors in his pancreas as well as his stomach.

On November 4th, 2015 at 3:30 in the morning, my mom woke me up urgently. My first instinct was that I was late for school, but I was immediately confused when I noticed how early it was. But as soon as I noticed the defeated look on my face, I realized that the words that would come out of her mouth were going to be the worst I have ever heard. She said to me “He passed away last night.” I immediately knew who it was and robotically got up and got dressed for the day. In India, when someone has lost a loved one, it is custom for close friends and family to come to the house of the deceased and pay respects and comfort the loved ones. Before I even entered the house, I could hear the cries and screams from those that were grieving. The screams could have anyone mistaking this house as a murder scene. The morning had both rushed by and taken forever. Around the time that school had started my mom told me that I was not going to school and I think that was the only time in my life that I had been disappointed to miss school.

As the day went on, more and more people stopped by, but a bunch of the kids had decided to sit in the basement and try to distract ourselves from the grief we were feeling. As I keep bringing up grief some of you may be saying, “Why is this so painful to her, they were not even related.” But to many of us him passing was like your mom’s brother passing away. It was like family. The next day I went to school and I attempted to go about my day normally, but I could clearly tell that something had changed. The day seemed so different, and so many things seemed so irrelevant.

I learned so many things not only from him as a person when he was alive, but also by his passing. During his time on this Earth, people were instantly happier and they tried new things when they were coerced by him. But after he passed, people changed positively as well, and it was not just me that had changed. My mom now does thing for herself instead of her family because she wants to live as he did. Enjoying life. For me, I learned that to get through hard things in life, you need friends and family around to support you. Without them it can be difficult to do anything.