Not-So-Happy Anniversary

Kylee Ellis
Dec 13, 2016
2 min read

Typically, I'm not one to dwell on negative things. I do my very best to get rid of them like old Bodhi diapers to be completely honest.

However, December 12th is a special day. Not a nice special day where you celebrate with cake or a nice dinner with family, but one where you visit a place nicknamed "a garden of memories" and you cry a little when your mom buys you a specific candy.

On December 12th of 2012, the only constant grandparent that I'd ever had passed away.

I won't go into details about how sick he was, but what a surprise it had been. I won't tell you the long story about how everyone broke down, so I had to handle phone calls and much more. I'll just tell you how my mother and I celebrated his life on the fourth anniversary of his death.

My mom ate his favorite breakfast (a Hardee's sausage biscuit) as we drove a few towns over to visit his grave. She decorated it with his favorite Christmas flowers (poinsettias) while I told my son how much his great-papa would've loved him and that he'd inherited the blue eyes he gets so many compliments on from that same old man. Before we left, she poured the last half of her McDonald's coffee at his headstone.

We ate his favorite lunch (tacos) with my dad on his lunch break before we visited his favorite junk store for a few hours. On Saturdays, that's what the three of us had done before he'd gotten sick. "Dumpster diving" we called it. It was one of his favorite things in the world.

My mom nearly made me cry by surprising me with an 89 cent bag of candy that I'm pretty sure no one likes but me.

An old man that we didn't know gave Bodhi 50 cents in Walmart. (This is something my grandpa would've done.)

It was a simple day, a busy day. We didn't cry (much) and we mostly had a lot of fun. He would've liked that.

I know this post seems a little short and pointless, but I had to put it somewhere. This space is made for things like that. Thank you for reading.