Life Before Thanksgiving

It was the Friday before Thanksgiving and as I walked out to the now empty school parking lot, I could see my grandmother waiting for me in her gold 1992 Ford Thunderbird. She had covered the seats with a leopard skin fabric in an effort to keep them clean and as I climbed into the front seat, I could smell the distinctive odor of cigarettes that she had smoked before she quit a few months earlier. We took the backroads of Woodcrest home to stay off the busy streets and as we started to discuss my day, I knew in the pit of my stomach that something was off. My grandma, loved to talk so much that sometimes I would drown out what she was saying. She was always joyful and always had a bubbly personality but that day she seemed to be in a

A few days later, we were celebrating Thanksgiving with a twenty pound turkey and my favorite creamy mash potatoes. As I sat at the dinner table devouring one of my favorite meals, I really didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, however, my grandmother mentioned to me that her back had been bothering her recently. Immediately when she said that, I recalled a time when she told me about her constant arthritis in her back, and how she has had pains in her back ever since she was 12 years old. To deal with her constant pain, she had been taking a daily dose of morphine for many years. This new pain was different though and she described it as an unbearable sharp pain that felt like someone was putting a knife in her back and twisting it. After multiple emergency room visits with her and my dad, she was admitted just five days after our car ride. By this point, my beautiful, rosy-haired, blue-eyed grandmother had such unbearable pain in and around her abdomen, that it was hard to look at her without feeling the pain that she was experiencing. Despite the excruciating trauma of the bladder cancer slowly making her weaker and weaker, she pushed on. My grandmother was the toughest person I knew and there had been numerous events where she continued to show me and my family just

Although, her mind was committed to fighting the cancer, her body was fragile and the doctors sent her to our house on hospice care to live out her final days with her family by her side. As I stood by her hospital bed that now replaced the sofa in our living room, I remembered specifically a day after school when we were getting a special treat at Cherry on Top. I recalled piling on the chocolate brownies and syrup on my melting vanilla yogurt and my grandmother telling me, “Good, better, best, never let it rest, til’ your good is better, and your better is best”. To this day I apply her thinking through my academics and sports. She firmly believed in me and wanted me to do my best at whatever it was that I set out to do. Although my grandma stopped working and retired years ago, she continued to show her ambition in her daily cleaning at her house. Her house was so clean, you could eat off the floor! As I was sitting by her side and staring into her crystal clear blue eyes, holding her soft warm hand, it suddenly reminded me of when just a short few years ago my grandpa and grandma took us on a surprise beach trip to Laguna Niguel, which was one of my