My great grand father was someone I liked, I have fond memories of going to his house with my grandparents. It was quite a dark place along a road with a fair bit of traffic, everything in there was old but tidy, clean and sturdy.
I used to sit in his rocking chair as my mom did many years before me and he would always give me a Ricola, original taste, which is a candy I still like to this day.
I never explored his house much, I must have gone upstairs two or three times at most. I think once I went up with my grandfather so he could show me his room from when he was young, but I might be misremembering, it was a long time ago.
Bonpa, as we called him, was a tall and well built man, surprisingly fit despite his age. He always impressed me in a good way, the kind of way that makes you want to look like that when you grow up.
From the bits of stories I could collect over the years, he wasn't always the kind old man I knew. He was a man from the past if you will, the kind to scold you hard for small things. A "strong hand" as men were back in the days, the kind to make you eat every last bit of your food because he'd known the hardships of life and at least a war.
Bonpa would do crosswords, that's a pastime he shared with my grandfather, they would work on them together and were really good at it.
I don't think they were ever competitive about it, it was always in good spirits, but Bonpa wasn't so good at them anymore. Words he had been able to find in a snap before were now impossible to grasp, and my grandfather needed to fill more and more of the little boxes.
Bonpa was an old man, he was more than 80 by the time I was born, and he had Alzheimer.
For a while he and my grandparents held on to it, keeping him in his house, visiting often to make sure everything was alright. But eventually, he had to be moved to an old folks' home.
It was a pleasant place, as much as these can get. A modern building filled with natural light, large corridors and nice colors. I remember being quite impressed as a kid going there, everything seemed immense and expensive.
I'm not sure about it, but I think I remember that Bonpa had two different careers in his life. He was a teacher, and he worked for the national railway company (SNCB).
I'm not sure of the latter, because my grandfather also worked for the SNCB (that, I'm sure of), and I'm afraid kid me might have been mixing things up. But for the sake of my story, we'll say he for sure worked for the SNCB.
In 2009, the construction of the new train station of Liège Guillemins finished. Naturally, Bonpa who was already in his retirement home by that point wanted to go see it. So one morning, my grandfather got a call:
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"Hello, Mr. Libois?"
"Yes it's me, you are?"
"It's the police, we've got your father at the station. He was found wandering in the streets trying to visit the new train station. Could you come to pick him up?"
"..."
———
Somehow, Bonpa had figured out a way to escape his retirement home and had wandered in his wheelchair without a clue of the directions, but with the decisiveness of a once strong old man who wasn't in his right mind anymore.
Bonpa died some months later. I don't know if he ever saw the train station, maybe my grandfather took him there, I'll have to ask.
It's my mom who told me he had died, his death is quite a poetic one.
Bonpa woke up in the middle of the night to eat some chocolate. It was one of his favourite things, I've been told he used to make "chocolate soups", it's similar to a hot chocolate but you need to make sure you have more chocolate than milk and add a healthy dose of sugar.
He then went back to sleep for the rest of time.
That was the first time I was confronted with death. No other person I knew as a kid, not even a pet had died before, and death was something I had never really thought about.
I wasn't sad when I learned the news, he was in his nineties, quite a respectable age to die, it wasn't tragic simply the flow of life.
And yet, it was a hard thing to accept for me. I couldn't get it out of my head, like something I knew was there but now it was real.
I had this vague idea that death was a horrible thing, the kind that you should avoid at all cost. That's why you must be careful when crossing the road and why you can't eat everything that comes under your hand, but it was always a distant threat, now it was real.
As special as this morning was, it was still a regular morning and I had school to go to. I didn't tell anyone in the playground, I was still processing.
Then we went to class, the lessons started as they normally did and that's the moment it hit me; Life simply goes on.
I stopped a moment and saw the world through other people's eyes for the first time, I realized that to them, nothing had happened and today was just another day.
This experience profoundly changed me, completely reshaping my way of viewing the world from a very centered one to being part of a whole.
Of course as a kid I couldn't have been able to put these words on it, I didn't understand it this clearly either, but the seed was planted.
Over the years, this feeling grew and became more and more relieving. I am temporary and what I do is only important for a tiny fraction of time at the scale of the universe.
I don't have to fight to do something grand, I don't have to do things to be remembered, I am not important.
I can simply live my life, enjoy the time that I have knowing that hopefully someday I'll also go to sleep to never wake up again.
The realization that I was part of a whole is the foundation on which my empathy has been building. And the more I've been learning about life the more I've been loving it.
We're all a bunch of tiny living things trying to find our way on a tiny rock for a tiny amount of time. All plants, animals, bacteria surviving in a world we all experience in our own ways, this is so precious.
I find it beautiful that death was the spark that lit the fire allowing me to start seeing life in all its beauty and make me want to respect it no matter what. I wish everyone to find that spark someday.