Summary

I have encountered so many teachable moments in my life, it’s hard to pick just one to write about. I’ve been taught how to ride a bike, I’ve went through the transitioning into college, starting a new job, balancing my relationship and personal life and it has all been a challenge but the most challenging and biggest lesson that I’ve learned was to appreciate everything, and not to take a single thing for granted. It took the passing of my grandmother for me to learn and understand that.
My mom had me at a young age, so she received a lot of help from my family members. For the first eight year of my life, I lived with my grandparents, along with some of my aunts and uncles. They took me to school, picked me up, bought me all the clothes and candy I wanted. Whenever my grandparents would go back to the Dominican Republic, I was always one seat over on the Jet blue plane to STI. My grandmother would cook every meal I wanted, styled my hair in the cutest style, take me with her anywhere she went, and cared for me like no one else would. My grandparents practically raised because my mom was always working. When my mom got her own place, my grandparents were back and forth between here and the Dominican republic. They didn’t need to help my mom anymore, I was older, my mom was more mature and my grandparents could carry on with their lives.
When I was around 12 my grandmother got really sick in D.R, she suffered a major heart attack. After that she moved back to America permanently for better treatment. She had constant appointments and doctors visits, then again the summer of 2018 she had another heart attack. I knew she wasn’t well but I thought she was okay, all the doctors had to do was a surgery and all she’d have to do was recover. My mom kept me in the dark a lot for the medical treatments and updates. Right before the pandemic, December 2019 my grandmother received a heart transplant. She had gotten sick a bit after due to people not taking proper precautions due to covid. She was in the hospital for about 8 months. That was the longest I had gone without seeing her. To my knowledge she was there because the hospital was safer than her being exposed to the virus and due to the transplant, her doctors were all there in case of any emergency. Now looking back at that time, I realize that the hospital wasn’t the safer option. I went through my life in quarantine waiting for my grandmother to be released from the hospital.
She was released mid August, and I was begging to see her. My mom said no because she can still get sick, her immune system was too weak. It didn’t make any sense to me because she had many visitors at her home. A few days later she returned back to the hospital. I started to think maybe something is wrong. One Tuesday morning I received a call from my aunt, to get ready because she was going to send me into an uber to the hospital to say goodbye to grandmother. I screamed. I was so mad, confused and felt so useless. Why am I just finding this out? Why am I the last person to know what was going on? My mom, my uncles, my cousins everyone knew, but me.
I grabbed random shorts; a T shirt and my N-95 mask and went straight to the hospital. My eyes were so red and swollen. This was a moment that I never wanted to experience especially not at the age of 15. That was the worst day of my life. The following morning at 8:06 am my grandma had passed away. I had so much resentment for being left in the shadows. I instantly regretted not calling more often, not going every single Sunday, not taking more pictures with her, and not asking more questions about her health status, and not spending a minute more with her. Processing everything took a long time for me to understand and digest. I had lost the person that raised me, who did everything for me, who protected me and who showed my mom, how to be the mom she is today.
Ever since then I call my grandfather more often, visit him every chance I get and everything that I had wished I had done with my grandmother I now do. I had experienced something that I think was important to life, it changed who I was as a person, and I was able to grow from that. It made me understand that things are not permanent, anything can happen at any given moment. It opened my eyes to not argue with your loved ones, to always resolve a fight, because anything can happen at any time. It was devastating for me that it took the passing of my grandmother for me to understand that, but that’s life.
Adults can give me all the advice they want but I’m a type of person to not truly understand that until I experience it. Hearing something and feeling something are two completely different things. It’s impossible to put into words how much that I have learned from this journey and the different person that I have become. I still have much more to learn, but I’m sure I will experience all the lessons that life has to offer. This teachable moment was a reality check that was needed, and really put meaning into the words, “everything happens for a reason.”