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I was falling into complete darkness, an empty space with nothing, not even air. Submerged in the absolute quietness, I felt like I was being choked. Even though my lungs were shrinking and expanding as fast as possible, I still could not breathe. My heart hurt. I tried to open my mouth wide, but all I tasted were my bitter tears. My brain was exploding because of what I had just heard. “Granddad just passed away a couple of hours ago,” grandma told me on the phone call. Grandpa is dead? Grandpa is dead.

I dropped the phone and cried, not because of sadness, but because of guilt. I’ve always known the inevitability of death. I accept death as a natural process. Death does not necessarily mean a bad ending, since I would rather believe that death brings people to the place where we all belong, the original home where all human beings live before they are born. Therefore, I did not feel sad for my grandpa. However, my guilt was eating me alive.

I felt like a sinner. I had known he was not doing well, but I did not do anything. Since grandpa had bad hearing, talking to him had become a tedious, annoying task. I had to scream at him, three times, four times, till my throat hurt. In fact, nobody was talking to him. Busy at work, dad and mom were never home. I was anxious about my college decisions, all the while worrying about how to maintain my senior year GPA when I was devoting  most of my study time to writing college application essays. Although I came back home early, I hid in my bedroom most of the time. When I went to the living room to get water, I used to see my grandpa staring at the television, often in silent mode. He couldn't hear anything — in fact he could not even see anything on the screen clearly — but he had nothing else to do. After undergoing surgery for his leg, he was like a dying bird whose wings were broken off. He sat alone a lot. Silently. Sometimes, when I finally took a short break from the intensive academic work, I realized that I had not heard my grandpa’s voice for multiple days. I would then try to talk to him a bit, but I soon got annoyed and abandoned him to hang out with friends instead. I told myself that it was alright to pay so little attention to him. “I am just busy now. Once I am free, maybe next weekend, I will definitely spend the whole weekend with him,” I would tell myself.

But the weekend never came and never will come. Grandpa passed away before I got a chance to make any time for him. I regretted it to extents that I wanted to punch myself. Why didn’t you spend a little more time with him? Why couldn't you be a little more patient when talking to him? Why was all you gave him was a mad face when he just couldn't hear you? I could not stop blaming myself. I was a sinner, which is not even the worst; the worst is that I could not even find a way to atone for my sin. I couldn’t fall asleep anymore because of my guilt. Every night, when I struggled with my somberness, I apologized to him, but it was never enough.

And then one night, I dreamed about grandpa. He was in the hospital, but did not look like a sick patient at all. He was smiling and his rosy cheeks were glowing. The layers and layers of wrinkles were gone, and his eyebrows were dark and thick. I jumped to him, and he hugged me — finally, once again, I was surrounded by grandpa’s scent, the special aroma of Chinese medicine and tea. His hand, warm and dry, was holding my hand, covering it completely, which made me feel so secure. Right before the apology jumped out of my mouth, he interrupted me, and told me that he did not blame me at all. He said that he understood how much I loved him and knew that I was just being immature. He kissed my forehead, and told me that he will always love me.

I was awakened by my own crying, and then I could not stop laughing. Normally I cannot really remember anything from my dreams, but that time, every single detail was crystal clear. The dream was so realistic that I could not believe it was a dream even after waking up. It was sunrise when I woke up. The golden, shiny skyline was like a sword, stabbing the vast dark sky to make the brightness leak into the horizon. The darkness that had restrained me for a year slowly began cracking. I heard my breath on that early morning, long and calm. Greedily breathing the air, my body was becoming lighter and lighter. I felt like a feather rising toward the sun.

Breathe in; breathe out. I turned on my cell phone, dialed the number that had been hidden in my memory for quite a while.

“Morning, grandma, I am just missing you and want to say hi…”