My “grandfather” Syd died when I was in seventh grade. He was 87, dying on St. Patrick’s Day in 2015. He died of a cardiac event, which was surprising given how healthy he was both mentally and physically. He worked at CU as a chemist in the labs spending almost all of the time he was there studying helium, and he would play tennis or swim everyday up until he died, which everyone was thoroughly impressed by.

He wasn’t my real grandfather, but he was in essence. I never knew my real grandfather on my mother’s side because he disappeared when my mom was in college. Syd became my grandfather, for he had such a strong relationship with my family because his wife was a good friend of my real grandmother’s. He would visit regularly just to eat dinner or watch a tennis match. Even though he had a real family about an hour’s drive away, he would even be at our house for holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas, which meant a whole lot because he chose to be with us instead of them. Whenever he came over when I was little, I would try to impress him by showing him the card tricks I learned from the kids at school. I would never do them correctly, always showing him the wrong card or accidentally showing how I did them, but he would always play along with them to make me feel good and he would always call me “card shark.”

I remember his memorial service so vividly. It was very cold and snowy day in April, but the snow was much heavier than it usually is. We went to the very top floor of the building he used to work in across the way from Folsom Field. Everyone got up and told their stories about him. Some of them would make us laugh and some would make us feel sad, but they were all good memories of him, which made his passing a lot easier for everyone. One was a story about him always hitting his tennis partner with wild serves, there was a second about the origin of his hatred for celery, and another one about him and his daughter having breakfast with Muhammad Ali a few days before a fight in New York. All of these stories made it easy to see that Syd lived a good life, and that we should not be overly upset about his passing.

The moral of this story is that family can be anyone that means something to you, even if you aren’t related to them. Anybody can be kind to anyone if they want to be, and anyone can fit in anywhere. Family can be whoever you look up to or whoever is a personal role model of yours, that is if you want them to be family. Anyone who plays a significant role in your life can be family if you so please, but sadly, I didn’t realize this until after he was gone. Syd fit this role perfectly, being that he was more involved with my family than my actual grandparents. That is why he meant so much to me.