Dear Grandpa,

How was your life? Was it worth living? I wish I had been there for it all. But I came in later on. After the pinprick of the cancer, and once the monster worked through your life stream. I came in when your angel started to fly higher and higher away. Taking with her you’re anchor of youth and your health. I wish I could have been there in your glory days when you fought in war and lived and partied without a worry or thought. When you didn’t have to worry about the constant days trickling away from you. Didn’t have to worry about the timer slowly ticking down to zero. But as you lived your glorious life you killed yourself slowly and carefully. Didn’t you? You knew that as your face would glow amber red, your breath blackened and hardened to stone. But you knew, didn’t you? That, what you were thriving from, was to be your death bed in the form of a puff of black smoke. You knew that you were gradually knocking years away and already were carving your tomb stone. With each breath in, could you feel your bones go brittle, your heart slow, and your lungs go black? Maybe you just couldn’t help yourself. It was what you lived off, what you thrived from; it was what you used to keep going. You tried to run away but your whole body would throb and ache with the desire and want for just one more. One more chance to slowly kill yourself a little more; one more chance to surround yourself in the thick dark smoke of your lost life. What about when your final days came. Did you ever regret? Ever wish you had a time machine to take you back to the day that you decided that it was worth it? As you passed in your delirium did you go back to that day like you went back to Vietnam? Did you remember that day seventeen years ago when you had only two years left? Did you remember sitting in the hospital every week for fourteen years after that with nothing but the silence and the pain working its way through your body, eating away at everything you held close? Grandpa, did you breathe a sigh of relief as you took your final breath and felt the pain and sorrow evaporate. We all miss you and hold tight to your lasting memories. But we all resent you, for living in a cloud of denial and death. But our love will triumph over the hatred as it always does. And we will tell stories of how your smile would split even the darkest of glooms like a bloody sun rise splits through the darkest of nights. Your memories are all we have left now. But memory fades as we all know. In time your face will slip away from the grasp of our minds. But our hearts will never forget, and never let go, of the man who we loved, who killed him seventeen years ago.