Carry the fire for the ones you love.

I don’t like St. Patrick’s Day. Nothing against Catholicism or Irish people. Green beer is fine, and I was always stoked when my mom made her annual batch of corned beef and cabbage. I don’t like this day because it holds the terrible memory of loss and pain. My grandma died on St. Patrick’s Day.

Every March 17th I think about my her and wonder how different things would have been if she had survived that car accident back in 1999, or hadn’t even been involved in one to begin with. This year marked the 25th anniversary of one of the worst days of my life. It’s a bit unbelievable that so many years have gone by; that’s a lot of living in between. Hundreds of missed graduations, marriages, divorces, deaths, births, and holidays make it hard for me not to miss her because she was a significant presence in my childhood. I reflected on this last quarter century without her, and I realized that as much as I’ve missed her, I probably wouldn’t have the life I live now if she were still alive today, or had even just lived another five or ten years longer.

I was born in Arcadia, California, and I grew up in nearby Alhambra. In 1993, when I was eleven, my mom, my younger brother, and I moved to Washington (state). It was a hard move for me to make for a lot of reasons, and leaving my grandma behind was one of them. We still got to see her, but it went from pretty much an everyday thing to a once a year thing. The visits we had with her after we moved were usually only for a couple of weeks, and she usually flew up to visit us. It was never enough time together; my brother and I were growing up too fast in between visits, and we were running out of opportunities to see grandma alive again.

From sixth grade on, I only ever wanted to move back to California after high school, when I would be eighteen and “free”. It didn’t matter how I got back, but I was going back. I always figured that I could move in with my grandma because the situation would be perfect for both of us. She still lived in the same house in Alhambra that she’d lived in for decades, just a few blocks from where I used to live. She had a big lot on her street that featured her three bedroom home and also two other apartment units. There was definitely enough space for me to stay in her house, but I could also have rented one of those two apartment units for cheap, and I was super close to L.A. I would get to live with my grandma, and I could help her out with stuff around the house. She could help me practice what I had lost in my Spanish. It would have been lovely. Who knows what I would have done for work, but I don’t think I would have started off in education if I lived close to Los Angeles. I think I would have been steered in a different direction. The tradeoff for getting some years back with my grandma would have been that I wouldn’t likely have met my current wife, and I wouldn’t have the family I have.

“How?”

On the day my grandma died (Wednesday, March 17, 1999) my brother and I were coming back from skateboarding, our favorite thing to do. I can’t remember where we went to skate, but it was a fun session because we were in good spirits, uplifted by the fact that soon we would be enjoying some of our mom’s tasty, corned beef and cabbage. Fire.

We walked into the house just in time for dinner, but something was completely off about the situation. Our mom was on the phone, and she sounded panicked. Our step-dad was looking at us, worried. He said, “Something bad’s happened,” and I could hear our mom saying into the phone, “not my mom!” Something bad had happened. The person on the other line (a cousin) was telling our mom that her mom, our grandma, was involved in a car accident. She was in Costa Rica with a couple of her cousins to visit family and enjoy their native country when the accident happened on a backroad in the mountains. Their car went off road and tumbled down an embankment. Miraculously, no one died in the accident, but my grandma later succumbed to her injuries at the hospital. She was only 71. That’s my mom’s age now.

Twenty-five years later, I mourned her loss, but I also thanked her for bringing me a gift year after her passing in the form of my wife and kids. It’s a bittersweet thought—I mean, it’s fucking trippy—but it’s true. I made good on my promise to myself to move back to California after high school. I ended up living with my dad for a year in Cathedral City (a small desert town adjacent to Palm Springs) before I moved on campus at Cal State San Bernardino. I have lived in the Inland Empire pretty much ever since then. I never made it back to live in the San Gabriel Valley, but I still have some connections to the area through friends and family. I met my wife in 2009 out here in the I.E., and it’s where we’ve dug in and made our hot and dusty home.

My mom is visiting from Washington right now. Since I’ve moved down to So Cal, I really only get to hang out with her once a year. It’s never enough time together, and we’re not getting more of it with her as it keeps on ticking away, so these visits mean more every time they happen. On this visit, we’ve already hit up Disneyland, which was in deed a magical, expensive experience for all of us, and we’ll get to celebrate my son’s birthday in early April before Grammy returns to Washington. We’ll squeeze in a lot of laughs and core memories in between, and I’ll do my best to not let my mom annoy me. It’s worth it.

We’ll honor my grandma by carrying her fire with love in our remaining years together.