Something everyone has to deal with at one point or another in his/her life is losing a loved one. Whether it's a friend, parent, grandparent, or even a pet most would describe it as a both brutal and heartbreaking experience. My first real encounter with death was when I was just the mere age of six years old.  Even though it was ten years ago, I still remember it so clearly almost as if it was yesterday, and I can still describe that day in perfect detail.    

It all started one day when I was waiting for my school bus to pick me up for kindergarten.  I remember that I was wearing one of my very favorite outfits, a puffy dress that included all sorts of different shades of blue and my shiny black buckle shoes with my tights that were as white as snow. My parents told me they had to talk to me, "something very sad happened" my mother said in a quivering voice. She then broke the news that my papa died, and of course before that I had never really experienced death before, except from what I had seen on television.  Naturally I decided to curl up into a ball on our blue pinstripe chair and pretend to cry because that is what you're supposed to do. I heard my mother mutter to my father "she doesn't understand", and to be perfectly honest I really didn't. I knew that I was never going to see him again but it didn't quite hit me at the moment considering I was only six just how tremendously heart breaking that was.         

Thinking back now I had an extremely special relationship with my papa. I can still recall special memories and spending time with him even before he got sick and had to be put in a nursing home. We would always have a game, every time I would go to his house I tucked my Cabbage Patch Kid doll into his always neat and made floral bed spread. The next time I came back to visit it would be in a new hiding spot and I would search for it and tuck it back into his bed. He would always put cherry tomatoes on toothpicks as part of a vegetable tray and I always confused them for lollipops and ate one, and I really couldn't stand tomatoes. When I got a little older he was put into a nursing home and we would go visit him quite often. Down the hallway from his room was a room with a type writer, and I thought it was one of the greatest gifts to the world. I looked forward to visiting him so I could go and examine the beauty of the typewriter time after time. I even begged for a typewriter the next year for Christmas.

As I'm reminiscing about these details I realize that these are some of the most distinct and clear memories I have from when I was around three or four. It leads me to believe that even though I was so young and wasn't able to really grasp the basic concept of death, at the same time I was able to hold on to the memories I had shared with my papa at such a young age. Although death is considered to be cruel, terrible, and miserable in a way, it can be beautiful.