I was fourteen years old when I moved to the United States with my mom and sister. When I moved, I had to leave my grandmother in Brazil.

My grandmother was the most loving, sweet, and kind person I knew. She always had her white hair tied in a bun with a white crochet doily.  She was short and cute. She was evangelical and God was the basis of her life. She lived on a farm an hour away from my city. I visited her when my father came to my city. My favorite memory about her was how she took care of me all the times that I was with her. Every time that I visited her, she made her rice pudding for me, and she didn't allow anyone to eat before me. I had never eaten a rice pudding as good as hers. The last time that I saw her, she said that she would wait for me to come back.

After seven months living here, I received news that my grandmother had gotten really sick, and my relatives ran with her to the hospital. In the hospital the doctor sent her to do a lot of exams, the results came back the same day. When the results came in, my family was told that my grandmother had only three more days of life left.

This news devastated all of my family. I spent the first night crying. It was my first or second week of school in the US, in the middle of the COVID 19 Pandemic. I didn't know anything about speaking English. In the morning after I received the news I had woken up with my eyes extremely swollen and red. I had an online Zoom advisory class. I didn't want anyone to see how I was, so I kept my camera turned off. When the advisory was over, my teacher asked me to wait. She asked me why I hadn't turned my camera on. After I explained everything to her, she spoke with my other teachers about what was happening. This made me feel better. But still during those days it was impossible for me to concentrate at school.

After three days my grandmother's organs stopped working and she died during the morning. My father, who was still living in Brazil, didn't want to tell me what had happened until my mom was there. He didn’t know what my reaction would be. But when I woke up, before my mom got home from work, I opened Facebook and started  scrolling my feed. The first thing I saw was her picture with a message of mourning. At this moment I start to feel a mixture of sadness, and indignation. I couldn't believe she left me. I didn't know what to do. I was crying, I was thinking that I had missed a lot of time and experiences that I could have passed with her.

During these past three years I have tried to tell myself that her death has not affected me mentally, but recently I realized that after my grandmother passed, I started to live my life thinking about death, afraid of losing someone I love again, afraid of feeling the same pain I had felt when she was gone. It has taken time, but recently I am coming to realize that I need to live my life, think about the future, and that I can enjoy a life that can be beautiful.

But even still, I think about my grandmother. When I left Brazil my biggest fear was to come back and see that she was not there waiting for me, and this is what has happened. I haven't gone back to Brazil yet. I still haven't faced visiting her house, and going to the places I used to go with her and her not being there. I feel like time has paused in Brazil after I moved here. Even though a part of me knows that things will not be the same when I go back, part of me continues to hold on to hope that nothing has changed.

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