The Passing

October 28, 2014 was my cousin’s birthday, so my family decided to celebrate and eat at Filippi’s Pizza Grotto. My aunt, cousin, and grandpa showed up in a gray 2007 Nissan Altima.
As my grandpa got out of the car, I heard a very loud, “thud!” My entire family rushed to the car to see what had happened. It turns out that my grandpa had fallen and hit the car, since my cousin didn’t guide him while he was getting out.
A look of worry washed all over our faces.
Ever since that incident, things did not get better. Things got worse. When we took him to the ER that night, we found out that he dislocated his left clavicle and there was an internal bleed in his brain, which caused it to not function properly. The doctor that we should take him to a nursing home to help him rehabilitate.
I remember going to Reo Vista Healthcare Center for the first time. I remember walking inside and signing in to the visitors log and looking at the old, stained, red and yellow rug.
The first couple of days for my grandpa were good, although in the next couple of weeks, we realized that the care there wasn’t what my grandpa needed. He needed much more than that. So, we had to transfer him to another nursing home.
The internal bleeding in my grandpa’s brain caused his brain to shrink, so he lost his ability to communicate and eat. Everyday, my family and I would go to the nursing home and feed him ourselves.
When visiting my grandpa, he would always enlighten us with his jokes, which made our visits to him much happier.
Sadly, when we thought things were getting better, they got worse. His kidneys started to fail on him, and he was getting sicker and sicker each day. The doctor finally said, “It’s time to put him in hospice.” So, we took him home. The doctor said that he was only going to live for 24 hours, but he lived for an entire week.
On April 30, 2015, he passed. It was the worse feeling you could ever imagine. I was sitting in class working on some Model UN paperwork, when my mom texted me.
“Papa is ...gone.”
“Are you serious?” I texted back.
“Yes, Papa is with the Lord.”
Once I received that text, I broke down to tears. My friends who were sitting directly across from me, asked me, “What’s wrong?”
I told them. Since I was full on crying, we all went to the bathroom to hide myself from the embarrassment.
During his funeral, I got up and said a speech.
I said, “My grandpa was such a great man, there was never a moment where my grandpa wasn’t happy. He was always a happy man who loved to crack jokes, and that was one of my favorite things about him. There is so much that I wish I could’ve said to him and thank him for all that he’s done for my family. I just miss him so much and will always appreciate how loving and caring he was.”
Never take someone’s life for granted. Always spend as much time with a person who has a significant meaning in your life, and cherish it.

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Project Reflection

For the project, Resonance of Remembrance, I wrote a memoir about my grandpa and how his death affected me on the way I see life. The purpose of this memoir was to show people to never take someone's life for granted and to always appreciate them for being apart of your life. In addition, I think my memoir will let people know to think about life a little differently. Through this project, I learned how to put a sentence on a diet, how to show rather than tell, and how to add sound to enhance a story. Those two strategies helped me create a great memoir that was able to fit under the two minute mark

In class, we discussed many strategies that Tim O'Brien used to write a great memoir. One strategy that helped me when writing my memoir was putting a sentence on a diet. There were 3 different ways on how you could put a sentence on a diet, which were:

1. If you have more than 3 conjunctions, put that sentence on a diet!
2. If you have two or more sentences joined by commas, replace commas with periods.
3. If you are out of breath at the end of a sentence, or if it seems confusing, break it up.

Tim O'Brien used this strategy in the book, The Things They Carried, when he talked about Norman Bowker (a character in book), and what he was doing with his life using short and simple sentences. He wrote, "Dark was pressing in tight now, and he wished there were somewhere to go. In the morning he'd check out job possibilities. Shoot a few buckets down at the Y, maybe wash the Chevy." I used this strategy when I wrote about how to never take a person's life for granted. I kept the sentences very short and to made sure that they get straight to the point. I wrote, "Never take someone’s life for granted. Always spend as much time with a person who has a significant meaning in your life, and cherish it." By putting sentences on a diet, I was able to make my memoir flow a lot more smoothly, and get rid of unnecessary and run-on sentences.

Another strategy that helped me when writing my memoir, was showing rather than telling. A good way of showing rather than telling is to describe the sensory details in a specific moment in time. (sight, sound, touch, taste, etc.) Tim O'Brien used this strategy when he was describing how a man looked using imagery which is using figurative language. He wrote, "His clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, and his finger nails were clean." I used this strategy when I wrote about my experiences at the nursing home, and how the scenery looked when I first went there. I wrote, "I remember going to Reo Vista Healthcare Center for the first time. I remember walking inside and signing into the visitor's log and looking at the old, stained, red and yellow rug." By showing rather than telling, I was able to let the reader get a better understanding of what my experience was like there.

In addition to incorporating O'Brien's writing strategies, the sounds that we included in our memoirs greatly enhanced the stories we told. The most effective sound I used was the piano in the background that played while I was talking about my grandpa's death. I used this song when I was describing how his death affected me and how I felt when I first found out. In my opinion, this sound enhanced this part of my memoir because I feel as if you could really feel the emotion that I was trying to get across and how it really helped when I made my speech during his funeral more touching.

By listening to others' memoirs and writing my own, I realized that learning about other people's lives is really interesting. I feel as in today's society, kids feel as if they're the only ones that are going through a tough time in their lives. But in reality, there are thousands of other people that are going through that same exact thing. This project matters because we're writing stories honoring someone in our life who is important to us in honor of DDLM. In addition, it matters because I think writing stories about an important person in our life is a great way to honor them and appreciate them for being apart of your life.

Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried