Hooptober 11: #61
[Criteria: 5/6 countries, Laos]

It's been 5 years since my paternal grandmother died almost to the date. I remember being with her on her last day, in her last moment. I remember her coughing up blood and her eyes rolling in front of me. I remember her suffering through the day with nothing helping her and her unable to tell us what was happening with her. I remember how fast everything went from bad to worse. I remember each and every detail like it has scarred in my brain forever. Everyday for the past 5 years, I've been questioning my own mortality, and how my final days would look like. For the past 5 years I've been running a thousand scenarios on what I could've done differently on that day to make her feel better on that day, to ease her pain and tell her everything was okay. But if I did go back and change things, would I even be the person I am right now? I have grown a lot in the past few years and what I saw happen with my grandmother that day definitely triggered something inside me that changed me for who I am today? Is it selfish to not want to change things? Will it drastically worsen the situation if things had gone differently? I don't know but these questions have always haunted me.

What Mattie Do's The Long Walk did was give me a safe space to reccon with all those things and deal with my grief in my own way. It helped me come to terms with some of the things I grappled with and gave me a some sort of closure. By the end when tears were rolling down my cheeks, I couldn't help but feel the movie had halper me make a significant growth in terms of moving on, and I am forever be grateful for the movie for giving me this space to grieve.