It's very hard to be excited about the holiday season because my grandfather is dead. I miss him more now than I did six months ago and it's very painful to go through the things he was here for last year and every other year but now he is not. I wish that I would have known last Thanksgiving was the last one I would ever spend with him. I wish I would have known last Christmas was the last one he would ever be there for. If I had known that, I wouldn't have bugged my parents to leave early so I could go to Joe's house.

I really, really want to stop thinking him. It's not that I don't care, but I want to move on, and there's a large piece of me still caught behind. It's hard to go to that house and sit in his chair and eat at his table and still be the same inside. This year we tried to carry on and have fun but it couldn't be done and I don't think it ever will. When I was little I remember feeling this sense of family and I was so warm and safe. This time it was just a bunch of people in the same room eating, connected by nothing. I miss that feeling. When I am older I am going to marry an Italian man because those are the only ones worth marrying.

We have to do this project for English in which we interview a relative about our country of origin. I wish I could have asked my grandfather things but the only person I had was my grandma, and she was pretty interesting. I asked her how she met my grandfather. He followed her home one day and asked her mother if he could marry her. All the way in Italy, on the other side of the world, decades ago, my grandparents were young and not grandparents yet, they were teenagers who had not lived or seen anything. And now I was sitting there writing about these seemingly unbelievable things, and it occured to me that all the things I'm going through now which are everything to me would one day be a memory on a piece of paper. I couldn't picture them young and in love. I can't picture myself old and having a husband and looking back at when I was 17 when my grandkid has to find someone old to tell them about the way things used to be. I don't want to die. I realize that more everyday. I had to look through photo albums to find pictures to bring to school. My grandfather was in many of them, and I would stop and look at each one and take note of how alive he was. He had seen and done so much. 75 years of living, breathing, feeling, and doing. He had lived every moment of those years,not wasted a second, and is how I want my life to be. Maybe I will die when I am old and gray, maybe I will get killed in a few years. Whatever point my life gets cut off at, I want those years to be incredible.

I'll never get over this. Christmas will suck as will all the other holidays from now until I have my own family. Ugh. I've come to the conclusion that it is better to have lost him and to have felt it than to have never known him at all. Things are born to die and he was one of those things and so am I. It's so hard to accept that. I'll never stop remembering when I looked down at him in the casket and how crudely painful that was. The road we took to the church for the funeral, the gray, horrible day it was, the things the priest said, the tears I wished to stop pouring down my face, the men who lifted the casket out of the church and the way we all put roses on top of it and then that was it. I'm really not over it and it hurts so much to think about him yet I keep doing it anyway. If I had one thing in the world it would be to bring him back. Knowing that this will never be rips and confuses me. I miss him.