“Yes.”
I sat beside his bed.
He reached for my hand.
“Your grandmother used to say courage isn’t being unafraid. It’s having someone beside you while you’re afraid.”
We stayed like that until sunrise.
Before leaving for the hospital, Grandpa gave me an envelope.
“Open it after I go.”
Inside was a photograph of me at five years old, asleep against his shoulder.
On the back he had written:
Emily, if I ever made you feel that I was keeping something from you, I was. I was hiding how fragile I had become because I never wanted you to stop seeing me as Grandpa and start seeing me as a sick old man.
I cried so hard I could barely finish reading.
Grandpa’s surgery lasted several hours.
