I. The Granddaughter

A medical student’s encounters with Death

It is my belief that health care professionals experience death from many different perspectives. We might be the relatives, grieving their beloved. A specialist or ward doctor in the hospital, a forensic doctor in a municipality, being called to establish the death of a familiar or unknown patient, having to determine the cause of death and talk to the family. Or we might be the doctor responsible -even partially- for a patient’s death.

A few years earlier, my second grandpa died. I was almost nineteen and he was eighty eight. Before his remaining leg was amputated, he was seeing a physiotherapist. He would regain his strength and go back to his little bookstore in our village, which he’d had for years. After his leg was amputated, he told his children that his time would soon come. They didn’t believe him. Then, one sunny Saturday afternoon, he told the lady caring for him and my grandma that he was going to take his lunch a bit later cause he wanted to sleep. He never woke up.

He had been living above us, with my grandma. The lady caring for them, called my mom, who was the first one to say at loud that he had died. I heard her when she called my dad at work and said “your father… is no longer”.

I saw him two hours later. My grandma was seated next to the couch were my grandpa had been laying. She said he looked like he was sleeping. My aunt, said he was still warm. Could it be that he was still with them?

To me, he didn’t look like he was sleeping. He looked like my grandpa, but wasn’t him anymore. What he had once been, was gone. Just his body was left behind, like an empty shell.

We stayed with him the whole night. Friends and family came to pay their respects and say goodbye. Some of them cried. I cried with them. You’ll never get a chance to say or do what you didn’t before. They’ll never know how much their love and support meant to you.

I kissed him goodbye on the cheek the next morning before leaving the church. His skin was cold as marble.

He was buried in a cemetery outside the village ; “In a place of bright, in a place of green pasture, in a place of refreshment”.

Not everything my grandpa did was right. But he loved and supported me and my sister. He was proud of us for being who we were and we felt it.
He will always be loved and remembered. And if there is a heaven, I hope that we meet again.

His name was Ilias. Like the sun.