Crying Memories
The smell of lavender soap still lingers in my mind. It was her favorite—the kind she kept in a cracked ceramic dish by the sink. Every time I catch a whiff of it now, I’m transported back to her tiny kitchen, where sunlight filtered through lace curtains and dust motes danced in the air. That scent is tied to the day everything changed, the day I realized memories aren’t just moments we store away. They’re alive, capable of healing and hurting with equal force.
It started as a simple homework assignment: Write an autobiography focusing on a significant event. Easy enough, right? But when I sat down to brainstorm, my mind went blank. What counted as “significant”? Graduating middle school? Winning a soccer game? Those felt hollow, like milestones everyone expects. Then, without warning, my thoughts drifted to her. To the way she’d hum old jazz tunes while folding laundry, to the way her hands trembled as she poured tea. My grandmother.
She passed away six months ago. I hadn’t written about it—hadn’t even talked about it much. Grief, I’d convinced myself, was private. But when my English teacher said, “Write something honest,” I knew I had to unravel the knot in my chest.
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The Kitchen Table
Her house was a time capsule. Floral wallpaper peeled at the edges, and the floors creaked like they had secrets to share. I spent summers there as a kid, watching her knit scarves she’d never wear and listening to stories about her childhood in Puerto Rico. She’d slip into Spanish when emotions overwhelmed her, her voice softening as if the words were too fragile for English.
The last time I saw her, she was sitting at that kitchen table, her silver hair catching the light. She’d been diagnosed with cancer months earlier, but she refused to let it define her days. “Ay, mija, life is too short for sadness,” she’d say, waving a dismissive hand. Yet that afternoon, her eyes were different—heavy, like she knew something I didn’t.
She pushed a plate of pastelillos toward me, the fried dough still warm. “Eat,” she insisted. “You’re too skinny.” I laughed, but she didn’t. Instead, she reached for my hand, her skin papery and cool. “Remember the good things, sí? Even when I’m gone. Even when it hurts.”
Three weeks later, she was gone.
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The Funeral and the Fragments
At the funeral, I stood frozen while relatives sobbed and hugged. Someone handed me a program with her photo on the front—a candid shot of her mid-laugh, her head thrown back. It felt wrong to see her reduced to ink and paper.
That night, I wandered into her empty room. Her bed was neatly made, her slippers waiting by the door. On the dresser sat a jewelry box I’d never seen her open. Inside, I found a stack of letters addressed to me. Every birthday card she’d forgotten to send, every note she’d started but never finished. “Querida Ana, today you turned 10! I bought you a dress, but…” The sentences trailed off, unfinished.
I sat on the floor and cried until my ribs ached. Not just for her, but for all the words left unsaid, the moments we’d assumed we had time for.
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The Assignment
Writing about her felt impossible. How do you capture a person in paragraphs? I started with facts: her name, her age, her diagnosis. But the words were cold, lifeless. So I tried again, this time describing her hands—how they’d kneaded bread and tucked loose strands of hair behind my ear. How they’d held mine at the hospital, even when she couldn’t speak.
Slowly, the story took shape. I wrote about the lavender soap, the half-finished letters, the way grief had surprised me—not as a single tsunami, but as tiny waves that hit at odd moments. Like when I heard her favorite song in a grocery store, or when I caught myself dialing her number out of habit.
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The Lesson in the Tears
Turning in the essay terrified me. Would my classmates think it was too sad? Too personal? But when my teacher read it aloud (with my permission), something shifted. Kids who’d never spoken to me before nodded in recognition. One girl shared about losing her brother; another admitted she’d never processed her grandfather’s death.
Grief, I realized, is universal. We’re all just learning how to carry it.
My grandmother was right: Memories do hurt. But they’re also compasses. They remind us what mattered, who loved us, and how to keep living when the world feels fractured. The lavender soap, the unfinished letters—they’re not just relics of the past. They’re proof that she was here, that her laughter still echoes in the quiet spaces.
So yes, I cried while writing this. But in those tears, I found something unexpected: gratitude. For her. For the messy, beautiful act of remembering. And for the courage to say, “This mattered. She mattered.”
That’s the thing about crying memories—they’re not a sign of weakness. They’re love’s stubborn refusal to fade.
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