Narritive essay

The Worst Day Ever

It was September 13, 2008 on a Saturday I was working my usual shift at Noah’s Bagels, loving my job not thinking that anything could go wrong. I went on my lunch break around 12:30 and ate one of the delicious six cheese bagels with garlic cream cheese calling all my friends to talk but nobody answering. So I decided to give my mom a call since I hadn’t talked to her in awhile. When she answered she wasn’t her normal cheery self, I could tell something was wrong. She was very hesitant to tell me though so I knew it must be really bad!

  

   I started to become frantic all these horrible thoughts started going through my head, did somebody die? Is somebody ill? WHAT???  But I managed to calm down; telling myself it’s probably nothing so I need to not jump to conclusions. And that’s when she told me that my grandpa had died the day before in a metro link accident. I was in absolute shock; my phone fell out of my hands breaking on the floor. How could this happen I just saw him not to long ago and now he’s gone just like that?

  

  I just broke down and balled my eyes out; I had never in my life cried so many tears. I couldn’t move I couldn’t breathe and to make it worse I was still at work and my shift wasn’t over. My boss heard me crying outside so she came to talk to me. She told me that I needed to go back to work because there was no one else to take my shift. So I sucked it up and went back to work trying my hardest not show my anger towards her for having such little compassion. I tried to just shove it to the back of my head like it didn’t happen I don’t think I completely fully grasped the loss yet.  Thousands of questions started running through my head like how did the train crash? Who else died? How am I going to afford to get down there for his funeral? How is my grandma? My brother? And then I got a flash back of the last conversation I had with him. “I hate you “I said at the top of my lungs! Those were the last words I ever said to my dear grandpa.  I will never in my life regret anything more than that.

My grandpa’s name is Howard Allen Pompel he was born March 22, 1938 and his life was taken September 12, 2008. He was the only father my brother and I had ever known. He was not just my grandpa, my father but also my best friend. I could talk to him about anything and everything. So you’re probably asking yourself if I loved him so much than why did I tell him that I hated him it’s because I took him for granted thinking that he was always going to be around so it didn’t matter how I spoke to him but man was I wrong.    

 When I got off work that day I went straight home to get all of my questions answered.  That wasn’t hard at all considering the fact that it was on every news channel in America. My grandpa worked at the World Trade Center in L.A. and he resided in Moorpark which was a ways away from work so he took the train there to conserve the gas. That day he had left work early to go play scrabble with his friend’s because he was the best scrabble player of all time. And that day he sat in the first car of the train which is something he never does. The train driver decided to text that day and missed the track he was supposed to turn onto making it so they crashed head on into another train. Everyone in the first car died instantly.  My grandpa was a very well known man so everybody who was anybody was talking about his death and how it’s such a shame that his life had to come to an end so fast. But my other questions still weren’t answered, since I live in northern California how was I at the last second going to be able to get down there for his funeral cause there was absolutely no way I was missing that.  But of course my mom came through and bought me my airplane ticket and I was there to properly say my goodbyes.

But when I got there I could not feel sorry for myself at all because my question of how my grandma and little brother were doing was answered, they were an absolute wreck. So I put my sadness aside to be there for them. My brother is autistic so he doesn’t fully understand the concept of death yet and this was his first encounter with it. He loved my grandpa soon much and all he knew was the fact that he was gone and never coming back so he was angry. Seeing this made my pain for my grandpa’s death kind of go to the side because my sadness became more for my loved ones that were suffering so much grief. I just wish I could take their pain away, but I knew that nothing I did or said could do that. It made everything hurt so much more why did there have to be such a thing as horrible as death?

It is now September 20, 2010 three years later and I am still grieving I don’t know if it will ever fully go away. But I have a learned a very valuable lesson from all of this which I hope to share to others for this is the purpose behind me writing this and that is “Don’t ever take your loved ones for granted for you never know when they might walk out that door and never return”.