My Grandmother’s Shroud written by Teju Cole, hit really close to home. Like the narrator of the article, I had almost identical feelings when my grandmother passed away. I still remember it like it was yesterday. She passed peacefully in her sleep at around 1 am and all of her sons and daughter went to her apartment and she was surrounded by the people she loved. The narrator says “to remain close to the dead, we cherish images of them.” After someone close to you dies, like the tears that flow out of you, the memories pour into you. I remembered all the little things my grandma did for me and all the little inside jokes that I had with her. For most of my life, she raised me. My dad had to work upstate at a restaurant and would barely be home and my mom would be working while also trying to learn English to try to provide for a better future for me. My grandma would pick my cousin and I from school, make us lunch and play games with us. She raised my dad and his 5 siblings in the farmlands in China and immigrated to the U.S.. My grandma and my parents grew up dirt poor and through their struggle and hard work, they gave us a chance to live better lives.

Like the narrator’s grandma, my grandma also had her demands. The narrator tells us that his grandmother had a single obsession and that was her “burial rights.” She insisted that she must be buried the day she dies and she must not be buried at home. She almost makes it be known that she must be buried in the robe that she wore when she Kabba, the holiest shrine in Islam. This brought back so many memories with my grandma because she always told me when I was young that she did not want to die in a hospital and she wanted to go peacefully at home. She said that she didn’t want the doctors to stick pipes down her throat and that was one of her biggest fears after my grandfather, her husband, died at the hospital. She didn’t trust hospitals and doctors and she made me promise that I wouldn’t ever let that happen to her. She also told us that after she died, she wanted to be left in the house for 24 hours before they removed her body. We all sat around her for the next 24 hours, face in tears as we let reality settle in; she was gone forever. Teju Cole’s article made me realize how everyone’s life may be very different in ways of upbringing, religion, culture, race, wealth, but at the end of the road, we all experience the same grief and darkness when it comes to death. The narrator says “Death makes us protest the fact of death. It makes us wish for the impossible.”