A cold draft chills down my back where my blanket were not; Something was wrong about today. Below me laid my brother who was still sleeping, if only he could’ve felt what I was feeling. I closed the door behind me, trying not to wake my brother. As I turn around I see my mother sitting in her usual spot every morning. The television sat quietly on in the background like usual but something was off about the image. My father’s chair was empty and where his white “Kellogg Community College” coffee cup usually sat, was gone. The look from my mother’s body language wasn’t normal. I could see the redness in her face.

“Chester, could you come sit down next to me” she says as she waves her hand towards dad’s spot. I sit down and I was ready for the bad news. I somehow knew exactly what was happening.

1900 miles away was where the real issue laid.

The house where my grandma usually sits is empty, the dust has started to collect on the shelves and the food in her bird cage was running dry. She thought it was just the flu but it turned out to be much worse. It was a side effect of the cancer that had been growing in her body without her knowing. She had gone into remission without any of us knowing and my dad had flew out to see her in the hospital.

“Grandma” My mother paused. “She died last night.”

Those four words hurt more than anything in my life up to this point. I didn’t know what to think. I couldn’t feel the gut wrenching pain that was in my stomach. The shock covered that pain up. I embraced my mother but all I could think of was what was going to happen. Change was about to happen. I was going to have to learn what it’s like without my grandma at christmas.

My grandma was always there during holidays and if she wasn’t there physically she would always call and talk to us. We would always receive letters from her in the mail filled with assorted goodies from candy to money she always sent something with the letter. She always signed at the bottom “With love, Josephine.” A signature that I would soon miss seeing. For the first time in my life, I knew I was going to feel what it was like without my grandma.

This event had more of an effect on me than I knew at the time. The biggest change I noticed was during holidays where she wasn’t there. We had constant reminders of her being gone. We had a giant blue reminder in the garage that gathered up dust. Her old Lumina which sat in the same spot, beat down and unused. Being reminder that doesn’t fade away like everything else. Seeing the Lumina each and every day reminded us of the good times with her but also showed the lack of her in our lives.

I can remember hearing her back up the driveway because the car made so much noise. She wasn’t the best driver in her age but the car got the job done. The dust wasn’t just dust but it was a reminder of how much time had passed since her death. The car hadn’t been driven in 10 years and my sister and I were turning 16, the age of driving. Looking at the car I could tell the last person to drive it was my grandma.

Cleaning the car wasn’t easy for me and my sister, going through everything knowing that she was the last person to touch any of these items. From the “old people” candies in the back(which we didn’t know where she got them from but they always ended up in our house somewhere) to the map pulled out of the glove compartment I could just know it was her. Deeper in the glove compartment laid paperwork for the car and her name was inked into the paper. Cleaning out the car brought back so many good memories. But  it also had a deeper meaning.

Those years of dust that piled up on the hood were being washed away. The memories, still intact in our brains that the car been apart of. There may be many things in this world I don’t know but there is one thing that I know, my grandma will be with me whenever we drive that car.