The father of my mother die last month.

Unfortunatly I couldn`t attend the funeral as my grandmother and him were living deeply in the countryside. When I learn the news from my mother voice on the phone, I just start crying even if I wasn't surprised. He was 89 and was suffering from anaemia for the last 3 years. His condition required him to go regularly to hospital to get fresh blood. I was sad as a grandson losing his grandfather, however I wasn`t feeling devastated. Of course, to meditate beside his grave was top of my prority, so the second day of christmas vacation, my mother and I drove to my grandparents' town and by the way taking my grandmother back home for spending christmas with us. It took us the whole day to do the return travel. That was a travel she was frequently doing during the last years.

My grandmother is almost as old as him and can`t drive for year, the hospital that could achieve the blood transfusion was in a bigger city 50 km far. So my mother drove once a month, sometimes twice, from home to my grandparents' in order to do the taxi job of bringing him to hospital, taking him back home and shop some food. It was a lot of travel in a couple of day each time. She had been doing that for 3 years until his death last month. She also taked care of the whole funerals and of my devastated grandmother.

When I look back in time and tried to find memories of my grandfather, I`m struggling to find one where he was caring or even lovely. For all my childhood he has been consistently a man very hard to live with him even knowing that he was getting better with the passing years. My mother hardly mentions her childhood with them, at least not the details. But I know that he was treating his familly in a violent manner. Not just the educational slap. I have always been kept in the dark by my parents about that aspect of him but my conclusion is that as a human being, my grandfather was an insensitive bastard that spend a lot of time hurting morally and phisically his familly. A confirmation was that my mother had been through therapy for more than 10 years now to try to deal with her past.

I cried when he died, but later when I was back home I understood that he left his living legacy. The funeral over, his widows and children stayed together alone in the familly house. My mother and my uncle start to argue, I haven`t any idea about what, but my mother decided at some point to left the house and go back home earliier than expected. They didn`t want her to. My uncle hurt my mother, leaving her with bruise. She managed to contact my father the day after for him to come and bring her back home. She doesn`t want to see her brother alone again.

When my mother talk about her father, and his 3 year long ordeal, she's happy. She's just regretting that she couldn't keep taking care of him longer for it was the only time in 50 years that she could find kindness in his father. As a teenager, I remember saying to her that if I would had been treated identically, I will have to forget my parents and that she should done the same. This has been a repeated message from my father, my brother and me.

Even if my mother and I have been through our part of fight, I think the more important thing I learn from my mother was the humanity of her behaviour. And I trully see her as a brave and resolute human being. I hope I could follow her path and act with such humanity and decency.

People keep talking about violence and death as solution to a lot of problem. The cowardice and the deep lack of humanity of these people seems so obvious to me now.