concrete

Deja Winfield

Personal Memoir

Larissa Pahomov

3 English

Concrete

This essay is going to be difficult for me to write because it has been two years, but it feels like it’s two days. I can still feel the hole in my heart when I absentmindedly look through my contact list and her number isn't there. Or when I’m at my dad’s house and I see her picture. The only photo ever taken of her. When I go by 52nd Street and her stand is there, but she’s not.  Or when I get stopped on the train and get asked how she is and have to explain that she died of lung cancer. Or worse, when my father is to explain and he gets a knot in his throat and you can hear him get more choked up with every word. Or seeing his eyes for the last two Februarys cause her birthday is on the 25th and we can’t hear her voice. Slowly forgetting what she sounds like What she looks like, or trying to act like everything is okay.

There are so many things I could write about. My life is a road with hundreds of potholes. Some of my stories could enlist the 86 pages of my own medical record, or growing up with two fathers who aren’t partners but best friends. These things have affected my life greatly, but nothing affected me as much as losing my grandmother days before the end of my freshman year. She was someone who help me fill those potholes. My grandmother helped so many others fill their potholes.

My grandmother played the role of cement in a world of concrete but she was not always cement. She was impossible to break without a sledge hammer. She grew up with a mental disorder, that she never told her children about. She never let a single one her four boys, know the name of her sickness, but her late husband saw it, and took them away from their home in California to move them to Rhode Island. Leaving her alone to sink deeper into her sickness. Soon after she moved to Philadelphia and begged to have her sons back. They had known their mother and the bad she done while sick and refused to go back to her unless she had gotten help. She would do anything to have them back and fought for them to be back in her life.

She began taking medication to bring herself back into reality. Her sons began to see her again but only for hours at a time, and months apart. She wanted them back in her life full time. But their father couldn’t allow for that. She begged for one of them, and the same visitations with the rest of them. He allowed her the youngest, my father. A young boy, of six years, torn away from his brothers and father, to live with a woman he barely knew. She raised with as much love as she possibly could. She broke down his concrete walls, and filled his potholes with cement.

When he turned 21, he begged his father for the right to know him. His father agree. But couldn’t keep his promise for long, losing his life to a heart attack only two years later. The word father was a word in the dictionary to my dad, and nothing more. He did not know the roles of a father or the challenges of being one. In two years he would begin growing his family. He would have to step up to the plate and understand what it meant to be a father. My grandmother stepped up to show him that there are many steps to climb and that you may tumble down them now and again but you will never hit the bottom with your child as long as you keep trying to climb. In another two years time my father would be on his fourth child, only two of them biologically his, but all four his children. He was and is a amazing father. A man I am proud to called Dad, even though he has fallen a few times, he's gotten back up to come back harder. And I thank my grandmother for this. Without her I don't know where any of us would be.

She passed away in a time I needed her the most. She was there through many of my battles. As well as I for many of her. My grandmother had gotten breast cancer when I was 11 years old. She fought a 2 year long battle and won. I cried for hours when she had told me that she was better. I didn’t return home that day. I went straight to my father home to hug her knowing for once that it wouldn’t be my last hug. But just because she had won the battle it hadn't meant she had won the war. Days before I turn fifteen she went into the hospital and was found to have lung cancer. And in that moment my only wish is that she lived until my sixteenth birthday so I could show her the gratitude that she deserved from the world. She wasn't given her life expectancy, we weren’t given if she would live or die.. She continued going for chemo until the day she died.

I watched one of the strongest women I knew start to become weak. I watched as she began to give up. I watched as my name began to be forgotten from her memory, I watched as she forgot how to walk. I watched as she began to forget how to talk, how to eat. I watch this women lose herself in her final days until she passed away at the age of seventy, five months before my sixteenth birthday. The day I had found that she had passed I spent a two hour train ride to my father’s house in tears. I felt my limbs get numb as I cried harder. I didn't want to lose her. I never wanted to lose her, but seeing her in peace in her bed I knew it was time. But seeing the tears streaking my father face like he had been out in a rainstorm, I lost myself. I couldn't returned to school. I need to be by his side. And I need to be the strong one. I couldn’t let him see me break down because we had to be strong for each other. I missed school for days, I went to the grave yard to pick out her plot, to choose the font in which her name was written on the gravestone. I was there when the mosque was chosen to host her funeral, and I was there when they placed her into the ground where she will now peacefully rest.

The day of my grandmother funeral also happen to be the day of Advisory Day at school, and. The park that hosted my classmates laid across the street from the service. I was able to make out the faces of my classmates enjoying themselves and being happy to be in that space. A space I wish I never have to be at again. It hurt me to see so many people happy when I felt that it'll be a long time before I’d be that again. And it did take a long time. It took four months for me to stop wishing that it was me, or that I had no emotions. It took a long time for me not to feel the hole missing from my heart at all times. I still feel the hole when I need someone to speak to or someone just to hug.

Can you imagine losing someone you thought you could never be lose? It was hard losing her. She made me feel like I belong, when no one else could. She made me feel as though labels couldn’t be put on me. She made me feel loved. I had wished for many months that I could have something of hers that would make me feel closer to her, but my father, as well as his brothers, couldn’t bare with losing things of hers, so they kept it. Two months after her death, they went into her apartment, the apartment that they had continued to pay rent for even in her passing. It was the one thing they could do for the mother who would risked her life to save them. They paid her rent for the five years of her living there. They made sure the money was in on the first of the month every month. But when she passed it had become routine for them. The order in which they paid never changed. Charlie, then Mark, the Terry, then Jonas. My uncle Charlie paid January, May, and September. Uncle Mark paid February, June, and October. Uncle Terry paid March, July, and November. My father paid, April, August , and December. Every year played out by clock work. My uncles would visit her when they came to pay the rent, but my father was there every day. But for the two months after her death her door was never unlocked. It was never visited. But one day, after many days of hesitation they decided to unlock the doors. They each carried a single box with their first initial on it. They each took exactly what they wanted, which was everything. But one thing they had found when looking through her things, one thing they couldn't keep was a small teal box, with a small tag with 11/11 printed on it. That little teal box holds the most important thing in the world to me. It was pair of earring that she had brought a month before she had died. They were for me to wear on the day of my Sweet 16, and I wore them proudly that day.

Losing my grandmother was difficult, but I soon understood that it was time. That she couldn’t keep endure the pain any longer than she had already. She wasn’t happy anymore. She was hurting in ways that many will never understand. I don’t know if she was ready to go. She was cement for a long time but in her final hours she had harden to become concrete again. She had to throw up the white flag and declare her truce with the war she was fighting.