My first time I dealt with death was in second grade. My grandma passed away from stage four lung cancer and it was the hardest thing that I had ever dealt with at such a young age. My grandma was my best friend so when she passed away, I felt like it hit me the hardest. Yes it affected my dad and my grandpa because they were her husband and her only son, but I had just turned eight years old and she was the person that I looked up to. She had such a positive effect on me and once she passed away I went into a shell with my feelings and emotions. It has been ten years since she has passed away and this is the first time in ten years that I have been trying to tell the people close to me in my life that I love them. After grandma passed away I blamed myself for her passing, which I shouldn’t have, but I thought it was my fault. I came up with anything to blame myself for her passing, it was just easier that way. After I lost the one person who I could tell everything to, I felt so lost and like I wasn’t good enough for my friends and family. I shut out people because it was easier for me to block people out then let them see what was going on in my mind and I didn’t want them to see my raw emotions that was going on behind closed doors. Still, ten years later I can’t even talk about her without crying because of all of the memories flooding back to me. I came to a realization when I was a freshman in highschool I finally talked to someone about how I always blamed myself. He helped me realize that it wasn’t my fault that she passed that she was sick and it was her time to go. I know that she was sick, but when I was a child who could understand what was going on, but didn’t know why it was happening, I just decided to blame myself for her. Another reason why I blamed myself was because she got worse around my eighth birthday and thought that if I would stop growing up so fast, then she would be fine, but that wasn’t the case. I miss her so much, she was and still is my everything. I just have to learn how to forget about the blame and remember her as the strong, beautiful woman she used to be.