I cried quietly into my pillow at night, ashamed of my resentment but unable to stop it. He told me I could become anything—but it felt like a promise without the means to keep it.
Then he fell ill.
The man who had carried my entire world on his shoulders could no longer climb the stairs without stopping to catch his breath. We couldn’t afford a nurse—of course we couldn’t—so I became his caregiver.
He tried to dismiss it, always smiling.
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“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“Just a cold. You focus on your exams.”
I looked at him and thought:
That’s not true.
“Please,” I said softly, gripping his hand.
“Let me take care of you.”
I juggled my final semester of high school while helping him to the bathroom, feeding him spoonfuls of soup, and making sure he took his mountain of medicine.
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Every time I saw his face, thinner and paler each morning, panic rose in my chest. What would become of us both?
He was shaking from the short walk to the bathroom. As he settled down, his eyes fixed on me with an intensity I hadn’t seen before.
“Lila, I need to tell you something.”
“Later, Grandpa. You’re exhausted, and you need to rest.”
But there was never a “later.”
When he finally died in his sleep, my world stopped.
I had just graduated high school, and instead of feeling excitement or hope, I found myself in a terrifying liminal space that felt like drowning.
I stopped eating properly.
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Then the bills started arriving—water, electricity, property taxes, everything.
I didn’t know how to handle them.
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