Regret and Forgiveness

I could tell by his tone that my grandfather was annoyed with me. He looked at me and said, "I don't know why you keep crying." As I started to weep, I told him through the tears, "I'm sorry. I'm just so sorry. I can't make anything better.  And, you're gone."

Suddenly, I was choking on air. My chest was heaving and I was in a dark room. I had been dreaming, but the fact that it was a dream didn't stop the tears from streaming down my face. For what seemed like an eternity, I could not stop my chest from heaving lying on my back on an inflatable mattress in San Francisco. I had seen my grandfather and I had had a chance to talk to him.

Over the winter holiday, my grandfather and I had argued about my "theories" and my answers for everything. His attitude had hurt my feelings immensely and felt like such a dismissal of all my hard work. I left California more than a little frustrated with him. The past few weeks this feeling has plagued me. I feel like such a jerk for taking his comments at face value. Instead of understanding that perhaps my grandfather was trying to relate to a whole world he didn't have any conception of, I treated his response as if he were an ignorant simpleton. What a fool I was.

I've been trying to put a word on what I'm feeling and it comes down to disbelief. I can't believe my grandfather is gone and that I'll never see him again. I can't believe one of the last times I ever talked to him was a fight. Above all, I can't believe that for a second I was foolish enough to think he wasn't infinitely proud of me.

My dream may have been just that, a dream, but now it feels like a sort of forgiveness, as if that dream gave me a chance to talk to him. To tell him I'm sorry. It has given me a way to understand my own grief. Maybe it is also a chance to understand that families fight and that for all his frustration with me, that my grandfather was proud. For Christmas, I got him a Harvard t-shirt and he loved it. He wore it the next day and made sure that everyone we were with took note of his shirt and told them about his granddaughter who goes to Harvard.

Unlike the dream, the reason I'm crying now, here in this Starbucks in Fresno, California is because I love my grandfather. I am crying because it is hard to say goodbye. And, I'm crying because my heart hurts.