my great-grandmother and my great grandmother

My great-grandmother peacefully passed away on the morning of December 20th at her home in Taiwan. She had woken up for breakfast, taken a shower, and gotten dressed. It was a normal morning that usually culminated in her routine nap – unfortunately, this time, she did not wake.

It felt especially heartbreaking knowing that my family and I were scheduled to fly to Taiwan just two days later, with visiting her at the very top of our itinerary. Seeing her had always been a highlight of our annual trips. When my brother Andre and I were younger, we didn't fully grasp the weight of those visits – but as we grew older, we came to cherish that time more deeply, seeking it out with intention rather than taking it for granted.

Each time we entered her home, you could see a visible change in her expression. We could barely communicate due to my horrible Mandarin and her impaired hearing. So, we didn't and simply enjoyed our time in silence, her holding onto my hand for as long as she could.

She lived a life of 98 years, full of stories. The wife of a general in the KMT army, she fled China during the Chinese Civil War, leaving behind her husband and never seeing him again. She later rebuilt her life in Taiwan and is survived by three children, six grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

We attended the funeral on the 26th. It was my first one ever. I expected the sadness to come from the ritual itself – the speeches, the bowed heads – but it didn't. What undid me was seeing my grandmother cry for the first time.

She had always been unshakable to me – practical and grounded. She never let anything bother her. I'd always tease her by purposely speaking broken Chinese or obnoxious English Gen Z slang precisely because I knew she wouldn't understand. As a child, when my parents were busy with work, she'd be there to take care of my brother and me. She is truly the best grandmother any grandson can ask for.

But that day, seeing her stand behind the podium, choking up at her own words, I didn't see a grandmother anymore. She was just a daughter who lost her mom.

My grandmother is 78. But time did not harden her into something untouchable, did not make her any less a child in the presence of her mother's absence. Grief stripped everything down to something elemental and undeniable. It made me realize that no matter how old we grow, no matter how many lives we build on top of the one we were given, we never outgrow the role of being someone's child. That tether does not loosen with decades or distance. It simply waits until it is pulled.

What remains is not the finality of death but the permanence of love. We spend our lives growing older, growing stronger, growing apart – but we never stop being held together by the people who made us. We never stop being someone's child.