Random Scrap:
My Grandmother died when I was twelve years old. I knew it when Dad, after driving to a telephone booth to call my Mom who was with her in the hospital, parked the car outside of the gate of our summer house rather than coming in. Things went on as they always do but nothing was really the same from then on. It was during the funeral that I saw my grandfather cry for the first time. Still, at the end he came to us, a group of cousins, and squeezed my small hand into his large palms. Now he was dead and I could not attend his funeral. The same day he died I bought him a Chinese hat. I looked at it and thought of how much he was going to like it, picturing his smile upon receiving it. It was the first time I felt so remote and isolated from everyone else. I kept writing emails to my parents, to my Mom to tell her how sorry I was. I still went to the Forbidden City and kept telling myself to enjoy Beijing. This was what he would have wanted me to do, I kept telling myself.