Why This Summer Has Been Challenging

Okay, it’s time for me to stop procrastinating addressing this, so I’m finally going to write this blog entry. This is a really sad and difficult situation for me, so I’m going to keep it short.

I live in Pennsylvania, but my dad’s side of the family lives in Texas. For much of my life, I rarely got to see that side of my family because of money constraints. The few times I did see my family all happened when I was too young to remember.

Two summers ago, my dad and I flew down to Texas to surprise my Abuelito and Abuelita — my dad’s parents. It was a really wonderful reunion that I will hold dear to me for the rest of my life. On that trip I also got to meet a lot of my aunts and uncles for the first time, as well as my cousin.

This summer, in late June, we found out that my Abuelito was diagnosed with stage IV pancreas cancer. We also found out that it’s got one of the highest mortality rates of any other cancer because people usually don’t find it until it’s progressed to this late stage. From the outset, we knew he didn’t have very long, but we were told he should have about 3 months. We immediately made travel plans to go see him over his birthday in July.

Three days before we got there, he passed away.

I am still hurting greatly over the loss of my Abuelito, and what is even worse is watching my father trying to process the grief of losing his father. I cannot imagine what he is feeling right now, because I honestly can’t imagine what it would be like to lose him.

Because of our travel plans, I did have to take a week off away from my internship — only 3 total days missed. Other than those missed days, I’ve been able to still keep up with my internship work, but I confess to having a hard time keeping up with much else, so I apologize for not updating these blogs as much as I should. This following so soon after the stress of my fiance’s family coming down with covid, it’s really just been an incredibly rough summer.