On this day 10 years ago, as I showered before work, my mind raced. My siblings and I had decided to move back to California. The culture at work had changed drastically, making the environment completely unbearable. My brother had been miserable for quite some time, missing his California friends desperately. And we all felt that we should be with our Mom. She hadn’t been doing well since our Dad died, and we worried about her constantly. The only thing that had been preventing us from committing to that decision was our Grandmother. We didn’t want to leave her. She also had not been doing well since losing my Dad. Her health declined rapidly, and she had spent the last several months in and out of the hospital. As I stood under the scalding streams of water, the exact thought that crossed my mind was “How are we going to tell her we’re moving back to California!? It’ll kill her.” When I clocked out of work later that day, there was a message waiting from my cousin saying my Grandmother had been found in her apartment without a heartbeat. She was in critical condition, and we needed to hurry. Instantly, those sentences from the shower flooded my mind. A wave of dread, fear, and sadness washed over me. She never recovered. I never recovered. Much like the guilt I felt surrounding the dream I had of my dad’s death a few days before it happened, I carried this anchor for many years to come. Was it my fault? Intellectually, I knew it wasn’t. But in my heart, I felt like it was. Guilt can be all-consuming. It’s crippling. It holds you back. It convinces you that you are unworthy. That you don’t deserve anything good in this life. It’s often irrational. But we tend to let our emotions get the better of us. It has taken a long time for me to work through those feelings of guilt, to understand that it had nothing to do with me. I wish I had believed I was worth the effort to work through it sooner. Living my life with strength and a truly open heart is the most significant way to honor her, and I’m just grateful that after all these years, I am finally on my way to doing that. 
