Can someone read my essay? What to add, what to drop? It's like an outline/rough draft, be harsh!
The scream still echoes inside my head, even years later. That scream belonged to my mom. As I woke up, I remember hearing the shrill cry that called out, “I knew it!” The scream shattered in her throat, and in that moment I heard her heart break into a thousand different pieces. I could only guess what had happened. While my mind raced through school– blurring out sight, sound, and breaths– I could only anticipate the moment my mom would meet me and finalize my new reality. When I saw her, she had told me that my grandfather had passed.
My grandfather had been pushed by a man named Jeff not too long before that day. He even broke his leg and had to get surgery. However, it was as if nobody told me that it would be my last time talking to him. It was as if everybody knew what was going to happen and didn’t tell me. My life had played and suddenly paused, and I hadn’t anticipated that a surgery on his leg would complicate his life, and have him pass away. I wish I got to say goodbye.
Only after, on a trip to visit my grandmother in Florida, I had realized I knew so little about my grandfather. To me, he was my lazy, sweets-loving, old man that played solitaire in the small corner desk on his computer, and whistled little tunes on the couch at family gatherings. However, I felt like I had seen a whole other side, a softer side, to him on that trip to Florida. I had learned that my grandfather loved musicals, and his favorite was The Phantom of the Opera. In fact, he loved music, and I found many cassette tapes that he had held a microphone up to slow, beautiful music playing. I remember staying up with my grandmother that night listening to these recordings that she had never seen before. I felt like a detective, discovering new pieces of evidence to sew together the character of my new grandfather, a man that I had never known before. My grandmother on the other hand, could barely look at the tapes, as if it encased all of her feelings–her fears– inside it, and playing the music would resurface those ideas.
Everybody has to mourn. For me, it took a full year later after the incident. My mother and I went to a medium who did a group reading. The medium asked, “Who has a connection to roses?” After a while, my mother took ownership and shared that she ran over her father’s rose bush as a teenager, and that she had a rose from her father’s funeral. After this, the medium turned to me and asks if I’m the grandson. With hesitation, I said, “Yes”.
The medium just tells me one thing, “You’re grandfather accepts you and is proud of you.” While I had not come out as gay yet, tears flooded my eyes with relief and with certainty that it was him. Up until this point, I had only shed a few tears, but it was this sentence that set it in my mind that I will never see him again, and I will never be able to come out to him. I will never hear him say, “I accept you.” But, if I believe her words, who can tell me that he doesn’t accept me? I can not say if ghosts or spirits exists, but on that day, I felt his jolly love again, and it taught me that I can not take time for granted.